


Soft Shores

by elo_elo



Series: Human-Turian Relations [2]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alien Sex, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Cultural Differences, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Human/Turian Relationships, Hurt/Comfort, Interspecies Relationship(s), Interspecies Romance, Interspecies Sex, Love at the end of the world, Older Man/Younger Woman, Oral Sex, Size Kink, Smut, Topical, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Xenophilia, lol, other smut tags to be updated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:13:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23831413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elo_elo/pseuds/elo_elo
Summary: An unlikely romance between an Earth evacuee and a turian general at the end of the world.
Relationships: Adrien Victus/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Human-Turian Relations [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1717168
Comments: 49
Kudos: 93





	1. Menae - Trebia System - Apien Crest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an elaboration of my one-shot Omni. It'll have the same characters and the same plot arc just told in a more traditional format (and with explicit smut lol). I hope you enjoy!

It’s 0800 hours and Palaven is burning. Worse, he hears over comm, than it was before. Worse certainly than when he left it. Days ago, weeks ago. Time is immaterial to war. Now more than ever. _Palaven is burning,_ Amunus says over the comm, and this second time it sounds more like a prayer, a plea to the universe. “No shit,” Adrien’s lieutenant says from beside him on the rampart, mandibles flaring, “Corinthus is getting repetitive in his old age. We can fucking _see._ ” 

And it’s true. Adrien’s eyes drift up, above the field, above their shoddy barricade. His eyes drift toward home. It spans the horizon, that great angry eye. Stretches across continents, licks at the edges of oceans. The reapers have turned the coasts to ash, the heat of them wicking up Palaven’s shallow seas to leave nothing behind but pale ridges sloping toward waning depths, fish gasping, blanched coral clean like jagged bone. He had gone once to the famous reef on the southern coast two hours south of Ciprtine. Watched from the shore as his wife carried their infant son into the shallows. He’d watched the waves come in, tipped in white, a kaleidoscope of color through the clear water when they settled long on the beach. All gone now, picked clean in an instant. Adrien stares up at that great angry eye searing his home in two and tries not to think about that last glimpse of Cipritine from the helm of the cruiser. It had been evening. The long, low line of the sunset livid pink over the desert, refracting across the wind-whittled sides of distant mesas. The shimmering tops of skyscrapers steeped in color, shattering like glass. The reapers a sudden dark blot in the sky, the cruiser drifting from the weight of their garbled echoes. Adrien tries not to think about it. Because Menae is burning too. His chest tight with acrid smoke, heavy with the scent of death. It’s different here than in other wars, in all the other places he’s spilt blood and Adrien wonders, as he comes over the rampart, the dust of the moon kicking up as he lands, if it’s the reapers themselves. The marauders bleed blue just like they do, but there’s a smell when they die. Like the kickback fumes from a transport, like something so false and unnatural it curdles his basest instincts, jars the predator inside of him back awake.

Adrien calls an advance; his lieutenant echoes it. They move as a wave. A fighter comes whirring down from the atmosphere, a smaller reaper in pursuit. Its wing tips the rockface and the line of fire it draws across the field casts a wave of heat that hits Adrien so squarely on his crest, he raises an arm to shield himself. His men are scattered across this quadrant of the moon. Cannon fodder. Muscle. He counts his bullets in his head, cocks his gun. The marauders are chirping over the ridge, closer now. Their subvocals hit like static. All wrong. A headache building where his crest meets his fringe. He can almost understand them, when the static hits just right, and the sound feels like loneliness, like fear. He tries not to think about the turians they used to be and takes a hard look through his scope. The men in front of him start to rustle. He can hear them under their breath, fearful trills, desperate chirps. All just below the surface, a hum of skittish bravery layered over. They’re young. Most of them. So young. Too young to die like this, watching Palaven burn. Adrien takes aim, hits the first marauder that comes up over the ridge clean between where its eyes should be. The rest come rushing over, His men rise to meet them.

He sends Vakarian out to the far end of their line because it’s over. More or less. Because even though he has been born and bred in the Hierarchy, knows that they will fight until the last man and they will do it without a word of complaint, an inkling of fear, there is some part of him, some tiny impulse, that wants to preserve something, someone. And Vakarian seems like the right choice, tactically even. Because he’s got connections outside the Hierarchy and, as much as it pains him, when Adrien looks up from his scope at Palaven’s great burning eye, the Hierarchy seems further away than it’s ever felt. As faceless and vague as the Council all those lightyears away.

So he watches Vakarian go, watches him disappear over the ridge and says a quiet entreaty to the spirits that whatever death finds his men, it will take them quickly. He says no such prayer for himself. Because he has lived a long life and as he rose through the Hierarchy, this is the death he always expected. Yearned for some long nights after Nilea died, left him alone to raise their son. But these men, _his_ men, have none of that. Nearing the tail end of their compulsory service or fresh into their military careers, newly minted before the reapers came. Hoping for Batarian pirates, for turf wars at the far reaches of Turian space. Adrien can feel their fear, see it in the way some waver, their guns rattling in their talons. And they _are_ dying. In droves. 

A brute comes smashing through one of their barriers and Adrien braces. The beasts started appearing days ago. He tries not to think about them, about the way their bodies undulate as they move, pieces and parts that come loose then retract. This one is making quick work of his unit on their right flank. They are dangerously close to being overrun and it’s with that promised carnage at the fore of his mind that Adrien vaults himself over the rampart toward the line his men are barely holding. The Hierarchy is far away from here. They need soldiers. They need fodder. He can be that. At the very least.

And that’s how he finds himself pinned. Trapped between the still smoking wreckage of one of their fighters and a brittle shale moon ridge nearly a click from their base. He has let go of his training and moves now on instinct. In primary school, they teach young turians about their hunting and gathering past. About a time, as they roamed across the dunes and coastlines, when turians ripped their prey to shreds with their talons, their teeth. At basic, they teach something similar, veil it in the language of sacrifice, order. The lesson is always brutality, no matter the skin it wears.

Brutality. Nilea told him once, after a fight, that brutality was all he knew. _There’s no room for softness in you anymore, Adrien._ Another fighter tips the rocks, goes flipping over the ridge, a shower of flame following it down. _There are things outside of war. Art and beauty and softness. There are things outside of war, Adrien._

A marauder beside him twitches as it dies, the reaper glow in its veins pulses one last time before those staticky subvocals rattle then fall silent. Adrien ducks down, crouching by the corpse. He’s low on ammunition, another brute swinging through the field, and his thoughts drift again to those primary school lessons. He runs his tongue over the sharp lines of his teeth, wondering if that’s what he’ll be reduced to, tearing at his enemies like an animal. And it’s in these dangerous, foolish distracted moments that he hears it. A crunch, the sound of skin coming loose from bone. Adrien pivots, pressing his back to the shale ridge to try and find the source of the sound. And he does. Just beyond the corpse of the marauder, a dead scion. Long dead from the way its motor oil blood has congealed on the hard rock. And something is clawing its way out of it. Whatever it is doesn’t get very far, slumping half in, half out of the corpse after only a few slow moments. Adrien rocks up onto his feet, crouching, drifting forward to get a better look. A brute screams behind him, a metallic kickback from a distant shotgun.

At first glance, it doesn’t look like anything at all. Just a clump of soft darkness tangled in the tacky gore from the scion’s open wound. The color reminds him of the tall grasses that snake along the bluffs on Cipritine’s southern coast, of Turian brandy. There’s a flash of something lighter, just briefly, that darts through the soft shape. Adrien leans forward, squinting his eyes. Smoke is rising around the field as the ruins of the fighters start to burn out, as his men lob grenades over the ramparts, another brute screaming in the distance. The thing moves. Like a tremor, a long shake. He watches it, hand drifting slowly, calmly to his sidearm. It moves again and his talons freeze. The movements are deliberate, obviously, but erratic. Desperate like a little frightened animal. And then, when it turns onto its back, he realizes, in a strange, slow way that it’s a human. He recognizes the shape even covered in the slick grey of the scion’s insides, recognizes those thin, strangely bent legs. It reaches up toward nothing. Five fingers; a flat, soft palm. The smoke seems to warp around it, Menae’s blues making the red running rivulets down that hand somehow brighter. Blood, he knows, though he isn’t sure how. Adrien can count the number of humans he’s met in person on both hands, but even he knows that the way its fingers are twisted looks all wrong. Adrien rocks back on his haunches, casts a single glance backward before standing, heading quietly toward it. The mass of the reapers has moved away from his position and an almost eerie quiet envelops them. He pulls his gun from his back, cocks it. Better, he thinks, to put something like that out of its misery. And he nearly does, aiming for the mass of dark color he assumes is its fringe, when it gasps. The sound stills his hand, makes him lower his gun. It’s such a quiet sound, one that barely registers. Then it cries out. Loud and animal and in that sudden, still moment, he can feel its pain, its palpable fear. The cry tapers off, rolling into another sound. A wet, stuttering sound he’s never heard before. It cuts deep into him, those primal urges that have been coursing through him since he arrived on this spirit forsaken moon flare up again, but this time it feels softer, quieter. Adrien reaches out toward the human’s still outstretched hand, watches with a quiet curiosity as those bloody fingers curl around his talons, holding on so tightly he can feel its stuttering heartbeat.

“You let it live.” Corinthus’ voice comes a little garbled over the static, his face splitting then reforming. Strange pixeled blots where his mouth should be, his eyes. The reapers are dropping husks on that side of the moon art an alarming pace, sending them like little drones toward the comm towers. A frightening, eerie sort of intelligence in those beasts.

Adrien still stands at attention. A habit, maybe, his hands clasped at the small of his back. “I thought it best not to add to the number of casualties, yes.”

The comm fizzles again. “It’s medically unstable and we are low on resources.”

Adrien bristles. “I’m aware of that.”

“There are no human outfits on Menae. There are no human outfits in the entire Apien Crest.”

“I’m aware of that as well.”

“So where did it come from?”

Adrien takes a deep breath, the air still tinged with smoke. He can taste it on his tongue. He’d thought of that, of course, as he’d carried the human across the field, back to their makeshift base on the ramparts. A brief, tactical panic flaring up inside of him when he found he could find no answers that satisfied him. “We’re not certain. Possibly from one of the reapers. It has a unique injury, similar to the husk corpses we’ve found on the moon so far.”

The comm comes rushing into sudden clarity and Corinthus is glowering. Adrien glowers back. “Is it a husk?”

“No.” Adrien’s mandibles flutter. “Not yet.”

“ _Adrien_.”

“If it becomes a hazard, we’ll put it down.” His nostrils flare. He remembers its tight hold on his talons, the horrible sound it had made when he lifted it from the rock. “We don’t anticipate that becoming necessary.”

Corinthus’ subvocals trill with a prodding teasing so wholly inappropriate for the situation at hand that Adrien has to fight to keep his own from whirring in warning. “I thought you hated humans, Adrien.” Adrien cuts the comm.

“It’s a woman,” Lutis says and it takes a moment for it to sink in. He straightens up, increasing his clip as the two of them walk across the brittle ground away from the ramparts. “From Earth. A young woman.”

Adrien frowns. “How young? A child?”

“No. Older than that. I don’t think she’s a soldier.”

Adrien’s mandibles flair. He feels a twinge of pity and then only annoyance. Because this has become his problem now and his world is burning right before his eyes. He can only imagine all the bullshit the Alliance is going to put him through, all the goddamned paperwork, especially now that the human is a noncombatant. Bullshit, piles of bullshit that he can’t afford to deal with. “Why?”

“Just a feeling I get. The way she talks.”

 _That_ surprises him. He pauses, turning to look at Lutis, his red markings flaring in the waning light. Night hasn’t yet come to Menae, not in the weeks since they arrived, but it will soon, a long evening stretching for days over the field. “She’s talking?”

Lutis shrugs “Sort of. Babbling mostly.” They stop before the makeshift medbay they’d erected the week before. Lutis inclines his head. “See for yourself.”

She isn’t talking when Adrien makes his way to the very back of the tent where Lutis has left her. She seems to be, as far as he can tell, in a deep, heavy, almost sedated sleep. He watches her chest rise and fall before he turns back to Lutis. The doctor straightens immediately to attention before shrugging out of it, a tic Adrien has gotten quickly used to since arriving on Menae. “Are all humans this small?”

“Probably.” He shrugs again, “maybe. How should I know?”

“You’re lucky to be in my unit, Lutis. Corinthus would have you strung up for insubordination the way you talk.” Lutis’ subvocals trill again and Adrien lets just the smallest of smiles flit over his face. It’s fleeting. The medbay smells like blood, the groans of his men just barely muted by the curtain Lutis has strung up. He looks back down at her. She’s curled up, her limbs stiff, pulled tightly to her body. In the harsh fluorescence of the tent, her fringe looks even more like Turian brandy, a deep, dark copper. There’s still some blood caked in it, some of that dark gore from the scion. “She was inside the reaper.”

Lutis trills behind him. “Yeah, can’t explain that one.”

Adrien turns. “ _Try._ ” Lutis blanches. “The Hierarchy is asking me hard questions. I imagine the Alliance’s will be harder.” 

“Okay, okay. I’ll do my best. Spirits.”

The human moans. That soft sound again that races up his spine and they both turn to look at her. She shifts, revealing her face. Adrien studies it. He hasn’t seen a lot of humans, but he knows they aren’t supposed to look like _that._ Black and blue. Swollen like an overripe fruit. “What happened to her?”

“Reapers fucked her up.”

“Yes, I can see that. I mean _specifically._ ” 

“Torture.” He says it almost offhand.

Adrien’s mandibles twitch. “Torture?”

Lutis shrugs. “Don’t have another explanation for some of her injuries. Some look almost surgical.”

Adrien’s stomach lurches. He remembers the staticky hum of the marauders, realizes that he’s never stopped to think about exactly how they got that way. “Spirits.” She moans again, shifting on the cot, a long line of red following as she moves. He’s never seen a human this close up, not alive at least, saw plenty in pieces on Shanxi, and it surprises him how delicate they look. All soft edges and smooth skin. It’s a wonder they’ve managed to survive at all. “Will she live?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Adrien. I’ve never worked on a human before.”

He looks over his shoulder, mandibles twitching. “Will she live, Lu?” Lutis says nothing and Adrien looks again down at the human in his camp. “I suppose it’s up to the spirits now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	2. Earth - Sol System - Local Cluster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the tags guys. There is graphic violence in this fic. Take care of yourselves <3

“It was like,” Corrine licks the coffee from her spoon, then leans her elbows onto the tile counter, wagging the spoon in the air. It catches the warm afternoon light, refracting onto the stucco walls of her apartment. “It was like a rumble, I guess.”

“A rumble?” Anita asks from the kitchen table. She’s in shorts, a halter that looks like a tablecloth, fabric so thin Corrine can see the outline of her nipples. Anita fans herself with a magazine, leaning back in the chair, stretching out her long, tan legs. It’s an unseasonably hot day. A dry heat that wicks up sweat, that bakes the pavement. Anita starts in on the peel of a mandarin with her thumb. The citrus scent fills the air. “Sounds expensive.”

Corrine scoffs, turning to face her, back pressed to the cool tile on the side of the counter. “Yeah, I fucking know.” She takes a sip of her coffee. It’s all sugar and cream. She’s been doing that lately. Eating like a little raccoon, all trash. “The car’s not even that old.”

Anita laughs, plopping a segment of mandarin into her mouth. “It’s pretty fucking old. Isn’t it like a 2170 model?” Corrine waves her off, trying to keep a smile from her lips. It _is_ that old. Bought it off a refab lot, paid cash.

She takes another long sip of coffee and stretches her arms up over her head. It had been a long night up at the studio. The kind of night where she’d smoked through a couple joints, sat cross-legged on the cool concrete and just painted. Watched the sunrise from the art building’s stoop, biked down Le Conte Avenue in search of some breakfast.

She’s working on a peach now. Canvas nearly as tall as she is. So up close you can see the fruit’s every pore. Condensation rolling down the surface in big globs of white paint. The kind of lush oranges and yellows and pinks that this day is starting to feel like, sun spilling onto their apartment’s terracotta tile floor, the palms lining the street rustling in shadow. Corrine’s chilled out even though maybe she shouldn’t be. Her mom’s always telling her to take shit more seriously, but the rattle her car’s engine is making feels very far away as she sips her coffee, letting the sun from the kitchen window warm her back. “I’ll come up with something,” Corrine says with a shrug, “no matter how much the repair turns out to be, I’ll figure something out.”

Anita grins, finishing off her mandarin. “You always do.” Corrine smiles. Anita stands, stretching like a sleepy cat. She yawns. Anita came home about the same time Corrine did, getting off late from a shift at the restaurant, the two of them meeting at the front gate of their building, hoisting their bikes over their shoulders as they headed up the stairs. They both could use a nap, maybe a night in, though Corrine figures Anita’s probably already got plans, watches as she pulls tinder up on her Omnitool. Anita glances up at her, flushes, then closes the app. “Aren’t you showing this weekend, anyway?”

Corrine laughs, scuffing her sneakers on the tile. “Yeah, but the gallery’s in Silverlake, so I don’t really expect to sell any paintings.”

Anita snorts. “God fuck, well have fun with the- “ She pauses, looking around. “Weird.”

“What?”

“Did you feel that?”

Corrine frowns. “Feel what?”

Anita holds her hand up, like she’s listening to something just out of earshot. “It feels like a - there!” She turns to look at Corrine. “Tell me you felt that.”

“Dude I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m not fe…” The rumble starts at her back, right at the spot where her skin meets the counter. She glances down. Big ripples shiver on the surface of her coffee. She narrows her eyes at it, then looks up at Anita. “What is that?”

Anita shrugs, frowning. She holds her hands out like she’s trying to test the air. “It just feels like…I don’t know. It’s just a weird shaking.”

Corrine pushes off from counter, setting her coffee down. She holds out her hands too. It isn’t just coming from the ground, there’s the slightest vibration in the air. She looks quickly up. “Is it an earthquake?”

Anita scoffs at her “Come on please, we would have gotten a warning. There hasn’t been a surprise earthquake in like a hundred years.”

“Maybe it’s the building then.” They both look up at the ceiling. It’s an old stucco. Uneven in places, leaks on the rare occasion that it rains. The building’s old, more than two hundred. Mission revival. In one of the last neighborhoods untouched by new development. Their landlord jokes every year that the next time they try to renew their lease, the government’s gonna finally condemn the place. It’s not _that_ bad, though sometimes Corrine swears the appliances are from the 2130’s. But no, that shaking feels like it’s coming from somewhere else, like it’s coming up from the apartment below them, maybe even further down. Suddenly Anita grabs her, nails digging into the skin of her arm. “Hey! What are you…” Corrine trails off, “doing?” Anita’s looking out the window and Corrine’s not sure she’s ever seen a look like that on her face. Terror, maybe, some sort of frozen dread.

“What the fuck,” Anita’s grip on her arm tightens, her voice sounds very far away, “what the fuck is that?”

The air feels slow as Corrine turns. She blinks into the sun and for a moment, she sees nothing. Just a blot of darkness. And then it pulses, lights surging up it. Corrine narrows her eyes, pulls both of them to the window to peer up at it. It looks, at first blush, like a squid. Sort of. Like a giant statue of a squid swimming through the air. But that’s not possible. There’s no context that Corrine can think of where that would be possible. “Is it like a…blimp?”

Anita’s hand is shaking around her. “A what?”

“I don’t know like a…” Corrine shakes her head, “like they have for parades.”

“You mean like a balloon?”

“Yeah, I don’t know.” Corrine frowns. “It doesn’t really look like that does it?”

“ _No.”_ Anita’s voice shakes.

It seems to be moving slowly. Just drifting over the tops of buildings, its tentacles swaying gently in the air. “Maybe it’s some kind of ship.” Corrine wracks her brain, trying to remember the galactic politics course she had to take in high school. They’d had to memorize each races’ ship design, but none are coming to mind. And she’s sure none of them moved like that, almost like an animal. But still, she can see its metallic surface glint in the sun. “It’s got to be a ship.”

Anita lets go of her, bringing her hands clasped to her chest. “Oh my god, what if it’s the turians?”

Now it’s Corrine’s turn to scoff. “The turians? Why would the turians be landing in Los Angeles?”

Anita has started to shake, never taking her eyes off the ship that is still drifting slowly toward them. “Maybe they’re invading, I don’t know.”

Corrine looks back out the window. She wavers, then doubles down. “I’m pretty sure we’ve had an alliance with them for like twenty years. You’ve been listening to too much of that xenophobic ass podcast you like. I highly doubt-“ That rumbling starts again, harder this time, louder. Corrine’s coffee cup clatters onto the tile, shattering into pieces. They look at it, then at each other. Corrine opens her mouth to say something, but nothing arrives. And then the ship makes a sound. Loud like she’s never heard in her entire life, like the air is catching fire with it.

Corrine crouches on instinct, bringing her hands to her ears, one arm linked with Anita’s. It feels like it’s going to rip her to pieces. Like the sound, this horrible awful sound, is just never going to stop. That it’s going to shred her, destroy her, and an almost primordial terror opens up inside of her. And just when she thinks that she can’t, _cannot,_ take it for even another second, it ends, just as suddenly as it started. Slowly, she brings her hands down from her ears, stands, helps Anita to her feet too. She’s shaking, heart pounding at the base of her throat. Her mind flips through all the things that could have been. She hears shouting outside, watches as Anita goes rushing to the window, calling out to whoever’s down below. It was like a bird, or some kind of animal. Projected, amplified. It was like a scream, like – the sound cuts through again. Sends Anita rocking backward, sends Corrine back to her knees. The air moves around them like the sound has a physical force. Corrine’s hair flies around her face. She closes her eyes, curls her fingers into fists. She feels Anita brush up beside her, hears the ding of her Omnitool opening. “I’m checking twitter.” She says, her voice breathy and distant. “I’m trying to see if anyone…I’m trying to see…maybe there’s some article or maybe the military I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe someone’s talking about this.”

Corrine opens her eyes, the air still churning around her. It’s closer now, the ship, taking up most of her view through the window. She watches as its tentacles open, a light flickering between them, red like the taillights of a car. She doesn’t know what it’ll do, can’t know, but that primordial terror that has seated itself inside of her tells her to _run_. “We have to go,” she says, pulling Anita to her feet.

“What? Where?”

“I don’t know.” Their narrow apartment seems suddenly huge. The distance between their kitchen and the front door further than anything she’s ever crossed. She holds tighter to Anita. “But we have to get the fuck out of here.” The doorknob is hot to the touch.

Time seems to speed up again once they’re outside. Cars whizz through the air above them, swerving lanes, bumping up against each other. She and Anita watch, glued to where they’re standing, as one loses control, smashing into a nearby building, a pop of flame. Corrine’s fingers hurt with how hard she’s holding onto Anita. A sudden staccato of gunfire has them both jumping and Corrine wonders vaguely where they came from. She’s never seen a soldier in her life. Not in fucking Canoga Park that’s for damn sure. Another rumbling sends the two of them scattering across the sidewalk. It’s closer than it had been before. Close enough that they can hear the windows above them shattering. “Oh my god.” Anita squeezes her hand, “oh my god it’s falling!’ A shadow passes over them. Anita’s hand is in hers and then it isn’t. She turns to look and finds only dust, so thick she can’t see past herself. The blunt force of darkness takes her tumbling downward.

She’s been in a sensory deprivation tank before. Just once. A birthday present from one of her mom’s new agey friends. It had been in one of those fancy rod-shaped buildings downtown. Corrine stood in eerie silence as the faint whir of the decontaminator rushed over her. The woman at the reception desk had been in one of those high collared dresses she’d seen on commercials for getaways to the Citadel.

This feels, at first, a little like that. Dark and quiet, just the sound of her own breathing, her own racing heart. But the air feels different here, even than the air in that sterile office had. Tangibly, horribly different. But she doesn’t have time to think much about it. The pain comes quickly. Rigid, burning, sharp. It rolls up her body, feels like it’s coming in through her veins. She screams and the sound echoes then fades away, like it’s lost in some deep, cavernous nothing. Corrine doesn’t try to scream again, something inside of her tells her to stay quiet. And she does even as the pain makes every bone in her body shriek, her muscles pulse like they’re pulling apart. But when her fingers start to burn, she can’t stop herself from crying out. She tries to move them, tries to feel something, anything, but can’t. Her body is rigid straight, fighting her as she tries to curl into it, to hide the soft parts of herself. Something closes around her throat, a chill where it touches her skin. She struggles against it. It doesn’t yield. Her tongue tastes like pennies. She can’t breathe. There’s something in her lungs, her throat. There’s something working its way inside of her and Corrine throws her head back and tries to scream. Tries to breathe. Her lungs feel sticky, flat. . She can hear the gurgle of her throat, feel her fingers twitch, grasp at nothing.

The first breath is nothing at all. Just her own blood in her mouth, thick in her throat. The second feels like something, Like potential. And so she crawls toward that air. It’s slick going. The dense something around her sounds like meat as she crosses it. Feels like meat under her fingers. An unsettling rawness that smells putrid through the metallic of her blood.

It’s hard to understand what’s happening. What _has_ happened. She feels herself in pieces, as scattered as her thoughts. Her right hand is _screaming,_ but her brain won’t let her stop and look at it. She keeps it close to her chest and just crawls. There’s something wrong with her right leg too. It goes limp sometimes, shaky, she has to drag it along behind her. She’s breathing deeper now, breathing more. Through the thick, viscus nothing that surrounds her she can almost sense a light. She crawls desperately toward it.

Corrine lands with a thud. The air tastes like smoke, but it is air _finally_ and she gasps, gulping it up. The pain that rolls through her now is so complete that all she can do is scream. Like a newborn baby, like a dying animal. She screams and then that panic rushes up inside of her and she starts to cry. Painful, pitiful sobs. She can’t see, can’t speak, can barely move. She reaches up away from the rock where she’s landed because it seems like something, like some singular thing she can do on her own, still in her own body. There in the air she finds something to hold onto. It feels strange at first. Almost sharp. Then soft like a nice leather, something coarser along the edges. But it’s warm. She tightens her grip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	3. Menae - Trebia System - Apien Crest

She lives. Even though Adrien thinks the spirits might be cruel for letting her. For letting someone live when their body is that twisted, when they’re so clearly in that much pain. He’s gone to see her only once since he pulled her from the corpse of that scion. In the middle of the night, drawn by spirits know what. Curiosity perhaps, though it had felt deeper, more urgent. She’d been curled in on herself, so small at the corner of the cot that he had to search, his eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness, before he finally spotted her. Her breathing had been shallow, labored. He watched as each inhale sent an obvious rush of pain down her body, every muscle tensing, spasming. Her hands covered her face. Like she could ward off the pain, protect herself somehow. He’d been deeply uncomfortable by the feeling that settled in his chest when he saw that. Found himself so primordially disturbed, he’d had to leave the tent.

His men apparently shared the sentiment and one evening, the smoke and ash from a brutal frontal assault hours earlier still hanging in the air, Lutis comes to tell him so. Comes into Adrien’s quarters unannounced as he eats his dinner. Tents now. To shore up their dwindling resources. Sometimes at night, a wind will kick up, fluttering the sides of his tent and Adrien will feel just a razor’s edge from his ancestors, so close he feels the sharpness of his teeth against his tongue. Hoards of ancient turians roaming along the craggy coastlines of the main continent. He’s still not sure if he finds the idea comforting. He should, certainly. Back to those primal urges, back to a time that so toed the edge of chaos that only the rigid structure of the Hierarchy could keep it at bay. The genesis of Turian culture, a return to the basest of that structure. He should feel thrilled by that, but Adrien doesn’t feel any particular loyalty to the Hierarchy these days. Not with the it broke down so cleanly after the first reaper appeared in the sky. His only interest in Turian culture is the survival of his men. And his memories. Faint memories of salt clipped air, the chatter of subvocals on the streets of Ciprtine. But Adrien feels tired, above all. A feeling so heavy it weights him when he walks, makes him feel sunken into his cot the few nights when he can slip away from the comm center for some sleep.

The flap of his tent catches on Lutis’ armor and the doctor twists away from it, fussing with his talons against the fabric. Smoke follows him in, the acrid smell of rot. Adrien sets his utensils down on his rickety prefab table. He can tell whatever conversation the doctor intends to have with him is going to grate before he even opens his mouth. A look he has, the way his subvocals clang noisily. So Adrien doesn’t let him, not for several minutes. Doesn’t relieve him from attention until the moment becomes so swollen with expectation that Lutis can’t stand it. “She’s scaring them,” he says and Adrien can feel the rush of his subvocals, a manic hum that sweeps quickly over him. He simply grunts in response. He lost 37 men out on the ridge just a few hours ago. They are pulling four figure casualties every hour on this spiritforsaken rock. 37 should be nothing. But these men all died at once when the wing of a downed frigate fell from orbit. The impact so heavy it pulled some of their fortifications clean from the rockface. Adrien can still hear the wing smoking, a pop when the dying flames hit circuits, fuel. Their blood ran blue across the shale in one wide river. Mashed to nothing. All together. Comm specialist Tarquin Analaeus was one of them. Same name as his son. _My girlfriend is pregnant,_ he’d told Adrien two days ago when they cut the comm with Corinthus. _Congratulations,_ Adrien said, even as his subvocals trilled _I’m sorry._ So, no, he doesn’t care about the human in their med tent, even if his thoughts sometimes drift to the way its spindly fingers curled around his talon . Lutis presses on anyway, unconcerned with way his commanding officer has drifted into his own thoughts “It’s bad for morale.” Lutis blanches from the look Adrien fixes him with but still holds firm. “Rumors have started circulating. That she’s bad luck.”

Adrien shifts in his seat, widening his legs. He rests oen hand on his knee. His first ever commanding officer, _may the spirits rest him,_ sat exactly like this and the realization of the echo is almost enough to pull him out of it. _Almost._ He doubles down. “I’m interested in statistics and strategy, Lutis. Not whatever ghost stories are circulating the lower ranks.”

“That’s not true.”

Adrien’s mandibles flutter. “Talking back to a commanding officer is punishable by-“

“That’s not true, Adrien. You’re interested in the well-being of your men and if you want me to be honest, that’s the only reason I haven’t taken the first transport off this rock and fucked off to whatever corner of the galaxy is furthest from here.”

“Always threatening desertion, Lutis,” Adrien says taking a few bites of his rations. His sense of taste has been rattled by the moon, sense of smell too. Everything is ash. “Someday someone will take you seriously and court martial you.”

“I think the Hierarchy has bigger things to worry about now.”

Adrien chuckles. The banter is nice even if it feels so gratingly out of place. “So what is it you’ve really come to tell me, then?”

Lutis straightens up, his voice even and serious again. “She’s in a great deal of pain and her moaning is frightening the men. It’s keeping them up at night.”

Adrien takes another tasteless bite of food. “Then sedate her.”

“We don’t have levo complaint sedatives.”

“Then use dextro.”

Lutis bristles. “I would rather save those for our own men.”

Adrien looks up from his meal. “What are you asking me, Lutis?”

That’s how the human ends up in his tent. Her cot pushed into the corner by the front flaps. A good show for his men. _I’m taking responsibility for this,_ he hopes the move conveys, _I have everything under control._ Adrien lasts two nights. It’s the whimpering that gets him. He’s not sure he’s ever heard a sound quite like it. High and soft and so tangibly full of pain that he can feel it inside of himself. On the second night the whining descends into babbling, soft and high just the same, but those almost words fill him with a kind of dread he hasn’t felt since he was a child.

“Sedate her,” he says, coming nearly crashing into the med tent, “I don’t care how you do it, but keep her quiet.” 

She’s not in waking pain now, but Adrien knows that whatever dense, sedated slumber she’s fallen into isn’t free from it. She’s shifty in her sleep. It’s an improvement, at the very least.

He’s gone from camp for three days. Returns with a limp and a weariness so heavy over him that he feels, as he comes up over the ridge, that he might just need to crawl his way back to his tent. They’d pushed the reaper forces back over the moon’s far canyon. Lost half their unit doing it. Adrien smells like blood, can feel the thick stickiness of his own down his left thigh. It smarts as he moves.

Adrien glances over at her cot as he brushes through the tent’s front flaps. It’s an impulse now. One he tries not to interrogate. He finds her curled into an almost perfect ball; her broken hand tucked at the center of her. Lutis has cleaned her up some in his absence, though Adrien still finds her skin confusing. It’s marbled, a swirl of color. _Bruises,_ Lutis told him when he asked one morning, tired of working out the problem in his own head. It’s blood. Those swirling colors. Burst blood up close to the skin. The very idea unnerves him. That human skin could be so thin that their blood would show through it.

Adrien pulls his shotgun from his back, examines it carefully. It jammed out on the field. Spirits, he’s lucky that all he walked away from that fight with is a strained neck and a gash on his thigh. Adrien squints at the barrel. He should take it to the armory immediately. Have it looked at, have it fixed. But hes dead on his feet, so instead he sets it down gingerly onto the brittle earth. 

By now the sound of her shifting on the cot is familiar. Routine. He settles into it as he pries his armor off piece by piece. She whimpers. Adrien freezes. It’s the first sound she’s made in nearly a week aside from the soft sighs he sometimes hears when Lutis comes to take her vitals. He turns back to look at her. She’s stretched out now, head heavy on one end of the cot. Her uninjured hand moves slowly against the fabric, like she’s trying to memorize the feeling. Then, with a quiet sigh, she falls still again. Adrien narrows his eyes, mandibles twitching. She reminds him of small animals, little pets. Helpless, harmless things. Things you grow fond of. Things that grate. He feels in and out of himself. Broken down. Adrien Victus does not flinch in the face of war. Not anymore. All those impulses have been stripped clean from him. But this doesn’t feel like war and the human girl’s presence drives that harder home.

He is, principally, a strategist. Always has been, always, at least for whatever short time he surely has left, will be. But there is no strategy for the entire galaxy. A strategy for total war but not total destruction. Enemies are supposed to have limits, fears. They are supposed to have weaknesses. These, as far as he can tell, do not. No sense of self-preservation. He has wondered, more than once as he stared down the face of a brute, toed the corpse of a marauder, if the reapers understand the fear they instill or if they don’t even have the mechanisms to fathom it. He isn’t sure what’s worse. The human gasps pulling him hard from his thoughts. She sighs again, then falls quiet.

All the sounds she makes are soft. The thought strikes him as odd. He ignores it, glances back at her. Her hands are curled into little fists, pulled up in front of her face as if to shield it. He remembers a song his wife used to hum. When they would walk together on the street near their old house, then sometimes just as she was drifting off to sleep. Almost a lullaby, so soft a tune. Adrien doesn’t know why he’s thinking of that now. He turns away from her.

Major Plasius Tanilius is the sternest man Adrien has ever met. He is, as far as Adrien can tell, devoid entirely of personality, with less emotional range the lancer strapped to his back. The kind of man who, back on Palaven, would linger silently on the periphery. Vacant. Unflinching. Perfect for war.

He’s retching beside Adrien now. Shivering. Sweat glistening on his crest as he heaves. Adrien can hardly blame him. The smell is incredible. And it’s the least offensive thing about the scene they’ve stumbled onto. “Humans.” Adrien says as he toes a piece of flesh with his boot. It’s equal parts question and statement. He recognizes the shape of the hand, the same marbled bruising as on the human back at base. He turns back to his lieutenant. “Try to reach Corinthus. I want confirmation that there are still no human outfits in the Apien Crest.” The lieutenant salutes, then scurries back a few meters behind them. Adrien hears the familiar ping of the comm.

The harvester that brought them to this ridge in the first place lays twitching on the shale. Every so often a horrible sloshing sound will come from the open wound on its abdomen – like it too is retching – and dark gore will spill onto the rock. “Sprits,” Plasius says, still bent over, still shivering, “is that a face?” Adrien narrows his eyes, mandibles twitching, then turns to look toward where the major is pointing. It is a face. A human face. What’s left of it at least. Its jaw has been torn open, eyes bulging from their sockets, skin loose from its skull. “ _Spirits_.” Plasius stands, running his talons along his fringe. “How many corpses do you think there are in this field?”

Adrien shakes his head. “I couldn’t even begin to count.” They are spread across a great distance but all of them, as far as he can tell, have come from the harvester, ejected when it died. The corpse gurgles again, more gore pouring from its wound. More pieces spread onto the shale. A torso, one of their strangely straight legs. He recoils.

“Do you think this is where she came from, sir?” His lieutenant comes back up beside him, rifle cradled in his arms, eyes darting across the field. He turns to look at Adrien. “The human back at camp?”

“We have no way of knowing where that came from.” But he’s certain. There’s a mark on her leg, just beside her knee, that looks like the skin of a husk. Grey and dull. It’s a mark no bigger than his palm, but he can see the same marks on the scattered corpses in front of him, some so covered in it their bodies twitch with blue light. Adrien shakes his head, flexes his mandibles. He has neither the time nor the desire to try and understand any of it. “Document this.” He says without looking at his lieutenant. “I’m sure someone in the Hierarchy will want to know about it.” Let the scientists find some deeper meaning in all that carnage. He doesn’t have the space for it. 

He finds himself looking at her when he returns to his tent that night. That half darkness that’s lingered over the moon for days casts deep shadows across her face. Tonight, she isn’t fidgeting, lays heavy on the cot. He peels his chest plate off and then walks quietly toward her. Adrien watches her breathe, her chest rise and fall. He tries not to think of her in pieces, of the foul smell that still lingers in his nostrils. It’s a fluke, he thinks, that she ended up here deep on the turian front and not instead in pieces across the dark, brittle shale of the moon. Certainly, there is some old turian poem about that. Fate. Its twists and turns. His wife would have known it. Adrien doesn’t. He reaches out, brushes her fringe from her face. There’s a softness beneath his fingers that he’s never felt in his life.

She’s awake. Lucid. It’s sudden. Out of the blue. Adrien falls into fitful sleep with her still curled around herself in the corner of his tent and wakes up to find her sitting on the cot, legs crossed at an angle that makes him wince. His mind races. He needs to now, on a tactical level, give her more consideration. Sitting upright, arms crosses tightly over her chest, she’s no longer just a slot in his mind where resources are diverted. She’s a living, moving, thinking liability. He feels a headache working its way behind his crest just thinking about it. But there’s something almost unreal too about seeing her upright. After the bodies in the field, all those human pieces, seeing one all together disarms him. Which is probably why, as he stands up from his own cot, he greets her like she’s just another woman he’s passing on the streets of Cipritine. “Hello.”

Her whole body moves at once, like a shiver rolling up her. Her eyes widen. They are already so much bigger than any turian’s would be and filled with so much white. It gives him the impression that he might be able to understand her without a translator, that her face could tell him everything he needs to know. Her skin looks thin, little rivers of blue under the parts of her that press close to the bone. And soft he thinks, though he doesn’t allow himself to entertain the idea of it for long.

He’s never met a human before. The closest he ever came was on Luna Base, back thirty years ago now. He’d gotten separated from his unit, ended up in hand to hand combat with a human marine. They’d resorted to bashing each other with the blunt ends of their guns, wrestling until they were both exhuasted. The human had reached for his helmet, yanked it so hard that Adrien’s ears rang. He’d managed to pull the service pistol from the back of his armor. One quick shot. Human blood smells the same even if the color that stained his armor back then was so alien. His eyes had been wide too, when Adrien killed him, white like the dust on their moon. 

“I…” They both tense at the sound of her voice. She glances around. She has long, dark lashes and they flutter as she blinks. Adrien finds himself transfixed. Wonders what possible use those lashes could have. Nothing about her body seems particularly useful, particularly well-suited to anything at all. Then the girl turns to look at him. Looks at him so hard that even though he towers over her, Adrien finds himself flinching away from her gaze. “Is this Earth?”

Adrien scoffs, pulled hard out his own quiet reverie. “Does this look like Earth?” Then he pauses, glancing around him. Through the slit in the tent he can see the amber dusk of Palaven’s sun spreading across the dark shale of the moon. For all he knows, Earth might look exactly like this. She doesn’t seem to hear him though, just stares blankly. Her eyes are one, flat color. Nothing like the shimmering, shifting eyes he’s always known on turians and Adrien wonders if all humans have eyes like that or if there’s something wrong with hers.

“We aren’t on Earth,” she says, nodding her head once, then wincing. Her eyes flit to him again and Adrien straightens up, suddenly aware of how still he’s been, not moving a muscle. “Are you…a turian?”

“What else would I be?”

Her mouth makes a shape he can’t understand. “Oh.” She opens her mouth again, but it just hangs. Her wide eyes dart back and forth.

Adrien rolls his shoulders back then makes for the front flaps of the tent. “You should have a doctor look at you.”

She’s alive. That’s all Lutis can tell him. And she’s in pain, which she tells the doctor when he asks. “But not too bad, “she says, cradling her injured hand in her lap, “not too bad really.” And Adrien respects that. The way she’s lying. Her skin is thin, and he can see every twitch of her muscles, can see very clearly the way she’s holding herself tightly, the way her neck is pulled taut with effort.

Lutis looks over his shoulder at him. “Do you want me to move her back to the med tent or? The men might…” Lutis lowers his voice, “still not…” he glances back at her. Adrien can see that she’s shivering, looking down and away from the two of them talking, “well, you know.”

“It’s fine,” he says, hands clasped at his back, “for her to stay here.”

He regrets that. Because a few nights in, after sleeping for what seems like an eternity, she sits up and starts talking. Asking questions mostly. He hates it immediately. She has a chirpy little voice that even through the interference of the translator comes through a couple octaves higher than any turian he’s ever heard. And her hands seem somehow necessary to her speech. Her fingers are too thin and too numerous and they splay out as she talks, wagging to punctuate each syllable, like some subvocal he can’t understand. Sometimes, when she seems particularly agitated, she’ll run them through her fridge, twist it around them. Adrien finds its flexibility unnerving. Finds her questions more so. A lack of awareness about _anything_ galactic that makes the messages Corinthus forwarded him about the potential for Alliance reinforcement seem almost dire. Humans have always been, in his estimation, woefully backward. She is only solidifying his opinion on that.

One night, she starts as soon as he comes through the tent’s front flaps. Rattling off before he even has a chance to remove his helmet. _Does Menae mean something? In Turian or whatever. Is it a Palaven’s only moon? How many planets are this system? Do you even know how far away we are from Earth? From the Citadel?_

Adrien has lost ten men in the last hour. He doesn’t have any desire to fill the gaps of the humans’ woeful education system. He firmly, curtly, tells her to go to sleep. And he immediately regrets it. It’s like he’s hit her. Those one-tone eyes of hers seem to take on new definition. Seem to sparkle, to wet. Her mouth opening again. She has a strange mouth, in his estimation. Too big, swollen even though Lutis assures him that the swelling in her face has gone mostly down, just the bruises remaining. And that swollen mouth ticks downward, a range of motion that makes his own jaw ache. Her jaw seems to be working over something, like she’s chewing. She looks off away from him, cradling her bad hand close to her again. “Right,” she says in a voice smaller than he’s heard before, “sorry. Of course, I…” She glances up at him. “You must be very busy.” And then he realizes, all at once, that the questions aren’t for him or for her. That maybe she doesn’t care all that much about the answers, maybe she already knows them. That she’s just trying to talk, be talked to. And he remembers those human pieces scattered across the hard surface of the moon. Adrien has no idea where she was before she ended up. Or for how long.

“I don’t mind if…” But she’s already laid down, pulled the thin blanket up over her. _Brutal,_ his wife used to tease, _not everything is a battle._

“It’s beautiful,” she says one night, rations balanced on her strangely bent knee, gazing out the tent’s open flaps.

Adrien sets his fork down and looks at her. They’ve been falling, much to his occasional dismay, into something of a routine. He’s in the tent less now than he was when she first arrived. They’ve pushed the reapers off, but now need to prepare themselves for their inevitable return. Shore up their limited resources. It’s kept him at the comm station for most of the day, but there’s still a few hours every evening, when his lieutenant takes his place, that he spends, ostensibly, with the human. And so, he’s used to things like this now. Her little intricacies. She seems to spend a lot of time thinking and sometimes she’ll open her mouth and a train of thought will come chirping out. If all humans talk like that, it’s no wonder they’ve had such trouble organizing. “What is?”

“This view,” she nods toward to open flaps, “the colors. They’re amazing.”

Adrien glances over. All he can see if the great burning eyes where Cipritine should be, sparks of flame popping and ebbing on the planets now dark surface. Destruction. That’s all he sees and his ire spikes, temper boiling over. He hasn’t been sleeping well, hasn’t felt like himself in months. Anger comes easy. It’s enough to be robbed of his already limited privacy to soothe the superstitions of his men. He doesn’t need to sit here and listen to a human tell him that Palaven is burning and she finds that _beautiful._ Not after the relay. Not after Shanxi or the death of the turain councilor or the way the humans have come begging through the comms for the turian fleet while his men die in droves. “I don’t want to hear human opinions on turian planets.” He says, setting his cutlery down noisily on the prefab table.

She makes a face he can’t read. “I’m sorry I-“

“That’s _enough._ ”

Adrien isn’t sure why he can’t sleep. But no matter how hard he tries, how heavy with exhaustion his limbs feel, he lays awake. The night is quieter than it’s been in weeks. They’ve pushed the reapers across to the other side of the moon. They’ll return, he knows, if the sudden drop in comms from Corinthus is any indication, but for now the few clicks around their base are quiet.

And the quiet gets to him. Unlocks some ancient instinct to wake and watch and listen. But it’s something else too. Adrien turns in his cot to look over at the human by the entrance. She is curled tightly in on herself, another show of strange gymnastics he can’t fathom in his own body. He sits still for a long time, just watching. And it’s only then that he realizes he’s making sure she’s still breathing, counting her inhales and exhales. Adrien shakes his head and rolls from his cot. He needs some air.

A chill has fallen over the moon. Everyone has noticed these past few days. With the exception of a few mining outfits, this moon had been, before the reapers, practically uninhabited. The minors had been some of the reapers’ first turian victims. They’re not alive to ask if this is normal, this sudden shift in temperature. And turian high command apparently has more important things to do than answer comms. Adrien has heard rumblings through the lower ranks that the reapers are doing something to Palaven’s sun. Killing it, snuffing it out. Adrien’s breath billows out in front of him. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate insult? To not only wipe the turians from the galaxy but salt their planet, end all possibility that something might rise from Palaven’s sandy earth after them. At least the cold air feels good in his lungs.

Adrien heads to the edge of one of the ridges, lets his boots toe the steep drop. He clasps his hands behind his back and gazes up at his home. It _is_ beautiful. The thought startles him. Sparks a quick flame of anger inside of him. But it dissipates quickly because he finds himself drawn to the eye above Cipritine. It undulates orange and yellows, pinpricks of red. It reminds him of fireworks and the skin of ripened fruit, of the colors that dance behind his eyes when he closes them. The red bleeds into blue, the cool air of the moon prickling his skin as he sweeps his gaze across the parts of his planet the reapers haven’t touched yet then into the blackness of space. It _is_ beautiful. Even the ash that still floats by in the air is lit by the fires across the planet. They coast across the perpetual twilight and if Adrien narrows his eyes, he can almost imagine that they’re summer bugs. That he’s home again. He glances back toward the tent at the spot where he knows her cot is and feels almost lonely. A quiet feeling. One he hasn’t had in a long, long time. He looks down at his hands, rough from the gun, one talon chipped and jagged from a fight. Her hands are marbled with bruises, the fingers on one still swollen and useless. But the skin still looks smooth to him, different than anything he’s ever seen in his life. A galaxy away. And yet they’re both here, breathing in the same ashen air. Seeing the same colors smudge across the sky.

“What’s your name?” He asks when he returns to the tent. He hears her shift, hears her consider whether or not to pretend to be asleep.

“What?” She has, apparently, decided not to. He hears more shifting. Doesn’t look but imagines she’s propped herself up on her one good hand.

“I haven’t asked you your name.”

“Oh.”

“It seems that I’ve forgotten my manners.”

The silence swells around them. “It’s Corrine.” Adrien’s mandibles flutter. It has a metallic ring to it. Two sharp syllables. Almost Turian.

What does it look like?” She nearly drops her rations, eyes widening. The first rays of dawn skim the horizon of the moon, filtering into the opening at the front of the tent. This dawn will last for a week. Until Palaven’s sun crawls again into the sky.

Adrien is fighting a nagging sense of unease that has followed since the night before. He takes a bite of his rations, a sip of dextro coffee. A luxury that the Alliance sent with their crates of bullets and their mostly empty promises of additional aid. A satellite drop, he’d explained once it arrived, sure that Corrine must be wondering why they’d left her here on this rock with the turians. “You were talking earlier,” he says, clearing his throat, “about the colors. Is it different than on Earth?”

She straightens up too, shifting a little in her seat, hips rocking. He’d inquired about them with Lutis not long ago. _Are they broken? Is there something wrong with them? No,_ the doctor had replied, _I think that’s just the way they move._ “Yeah much.” She shakes her head. “But we’re not on Palaven, right? We’re on a moon.”

Adrien’s mandibles twitch. “Your point?”

“Earth’s moon might look like this. I don’t know.”

“You’ve never been?” He asks, incredulous. Adrien has been on Earth’s moon, remembers the silvery dust that would kick up at even the slightest movement. He would find it in his fringe for months, even after he returned to Palaven.

Corrine shrugs. “I’ve never been anywhere but Earth.”

Adrien looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time, rearranges everything he thinks he knows about the human in front of him. He feels a strange grief that in a galaxy as big and beautiful as this one, the only place she has gone but her home is this spirit forsaken moon. “I hope where you’re from is beautiful then.” He says it almost without realizing and at first, and with a bit of relief, it seems like she doesn’t hear.

But then she turns, those eyes boring right through him.. “It was beautiful.” Then her mouth ticks down. It _is._ ” She corrects and even though he’s never spoken to another human in his life, even though their strangely flat voices make it hard for him to really listen, he can hear, for the first time, a waver in her voice. In the Hierarchy, grief is a tool. Something to be refined and refined until it’s so small you can discard it.. In basic you are stripped of fear and sadness. You become smooth, agile. You too become a tool. But not forever. His wife discarded everything they taught her when she finished her mandatory service. Her empathy a thousand clicks wide and growing every day. The pain of a whole city nestled inside of her. Adrien honed his numbness with war. And the human in front of him looks so fresh with grief he’s sure she’s never felt it before. And when at first, he thinks he will feel only disdain, he instead feels pity and strangely, worryingly, just a touch of jealousy. And then something warmer, brighter. “And what are the colors of earth then?”

She perks up immediately, color flushing quickly through her cheeks. Human skin, he is learning, changes shade like turian eyes. Her mouth curls upward and the sight makes him feel a little warm, a little unexpected. “I guess it would depend on where you are.”

Adrien nods, “I suppose Palaven is much the same.” He clears his throat. In the distance he can gunfire, shells. He can hear, though still distant, the groan of the reapers. She flinches at each sound. Just minutely but humans are so full of movement. He can see her muscles move under her skin and wonders briefly, oddly, what it would feel like to touch her. Another shell rockets through the air. This one makes her flinch openly. He watches her good hand open, watches as she stops herself from bringing it to her face. He remembers the way she’d laid curled up on the stretcher, cowering behind her hands. “Tell me about it.”

She blinks at him. ‘What?”

“Tell me about Earth.” Her mouth curves up and opens, revealing her blunt, uniform teeth. They’re pretty. In a useless way. Humans seem to be like that. Or at least this one. Appealing, but not practical. Appealing. He thinks it again. There is something appealing about her. Many things, he thinks, as she twists her fingers through her fringe. It has a gleam to it, even with the dust and ash in the air. Reminds him still of turian brandy.

She asks him a favor one morning over breakfast as the sun skims the horizon. it’s a relief. She’s been quiet lately. For days at a time. He can see the pain clearer on her face. She seems weaker, more tired. He’s started to pester Lutis. _This isn’t ideal for anyone I don’t know what to tell you,_ he’d hissed one morning when Adrien came to tell him that she wasn’t eating all of her rations anymore. The food is making her sick, they’ve decided. Dextro proteins wreaking havoc on her insides. Not as sick as it probably should be making her all things considered, but sick enough that the wound on her hand isn’t healing, that she seems to struggle in the mornings to wake up. So to see her perked up and talking again settles something inside of him. 

He tells himself it’s because they don’t need another casualty, that he doesn’t want to have to field questions from the Alliance about her death. Adrien doesn’t interrogate the way he knows that to be a lie.

He struggles to spell the name and the translators struggle to fight the interference between them as she tries, for the third time, to spell it out for him. “Anita Rodriguez,” she says again, “if you just look it up on the extranet you might be able to find her twitter. If she’s alive, she must have posted something.”

He sighs, flicking the screen away so he can look at her properly. She’s leaning heavily against the fabric of the tent, hands resting again on her knees. “The likelihood of me finding a single person on the extranet…” She opens her mouth to argue but he holds up a talon to quiet her, “ _even with my special clearance,_ ” she shifts on the cot, closing her mouth, “is practically nothing.” Her mouth turns downward. “But I’ll try,’ He says softly and there’s a part of him that doesn’t understand why he’s doing this. And there’s another part of him that can’t stop.

“Maybe it would be easier to look up a place.” She says, perking up.

“Yes,” he says, “much.”

Long Beach is almost comically named. Adjective, verb. No frills. He nearly asks her if all human places are named like that. But she’s looking even more worn out than when they started, her back pressed harder to the wall of the tent, sitting cross-legged on the cot, her eyes heavily lidded. “Is this where you’re from?” She nods. He scrolls down. Funny how the beaches look the same as those in Cipritine. Long stretches of sand lit golden by the sun. The water’s a little bluer on Earth, a little choppier looking. And the streets are lined with these strange, funny looking trees. Skinny trunks that bend and sway under a tuft of green. But the feeling is the same. He can almost taste the breeze.

He almost doesn’t show it to her. The first article he finds that’s at all relevant. The other news sites he translated from English into High Turian haven’t been updated in more than a month. But this one has. A human publication on the Citadel. _Southern California hardest hit by reapers. Wiping out nearly 85% of population._ “Did you find anything” He glances over at her. Her eyes are closed, hands heavy in her lap.

“Yes.”

She opens one eye. “What is it?”

“Perhaps it’s best we don’t look.”

She goes rigid. “What did you find?” He mandibles twitch.” Please, please what did you find?” He wavers. “ _Adrien._ ” And there’s something about the way she says his name, the way she doesn’t even think to use his title now that she knows it. His jaw twitches. He sends it to her omni. She opens it. He watches her face slam shut. Watches her blink, slowly. She does that, he’s grown to know, when she doesn’t quite understand. When her brain is overwhelmed.

“There are times…” he swallows, “there are times when…” He’s trying to remember what they teach young turians about honor, sacrifice. There’s a phrase…a…there’s something. “times when…” Trying to remember what the officiant at his wife’s funeral had said about cycles, about grief, about rebirth.

Corrine makes a wet sound in her nose. “I’m just gonna rest for a bit,” she says, rolling down onto the cot, “if that’s okay.” Her voice is muffled by the side of the tent. Adrien watches her for a long time, watches her chest rise and fall, feeling useless and numb.

She sleeps for so many days that he has Lutis come examine her. She has a fever now. Which Adrien doesn’t understand and, worryingly, neither does Lutis. “Humans run cold,” he tells him, “I read that on the extranet. Colder than us. She’s burning up.”

Adrien is stiff as a board. “What does that mean?”

“That’s she’s sick, I assume.”

“With what?”

Lutis’ subvocal clang, his mandibles twitching. “Adrien how the hell am I supposed to know. I’m a _turian_ doctor. I think I took maybe one alien anatomy class in my entire tenure in medical school.”

He feels a tug just below the plates on his chest. A sharp feeling. “Well go figure it out.”

Lutis narrows his eyes at him. “Are you serious? We’ve got the reapers breathing down our perimeter again and you want me to go read up on human anatomy?”

“Do something for her. And that’s an order.”

Her hair is as soft as he thought it would be. He brushes it from her face, lets it tangle in his talons. Adrien looks through the flaps of the tent, looks up at the burning eye over Cipritine. It’s growing. Every day it looks bigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3 <3


	4. Menae - Trebia System - Apien Crest

Her mom is probably wondering where she is. It’s the first thought she has when she can think again, when the fog in her brain clears out just enough to form something coherent. And even in the half-twilight of her consciousness, she knows what a dumb thought it is. And a painful one too. So it’s fleeting. Maybe by design. By necessity. She tucks it away. Because even in her haze she knows her mother is probably dead. That Anita is probably dead. That everyone she has ever known or ever would know is dead. And for another fleeting moment, she wonders if she is. But the pain, sharp all down her body, assures her that she is not.

The pain is a good distraction. Even with the meds they’ve been giving her. Opening her mouth up like a dog, pushing it all the way down her throat. She can’t fight back. Her body is limp, insides feel shattered like so much glass and all she can do is just let them. Bitter, chalky capsules that make her brain feel wobbly and her stomach turn over. The pills ground her muscles to mush, takes the pain out with them. Those first days are a blur. Of noise and sensation. She knows she’s being touched, moved, can feel her limbs turning and her body rolling. She tries to speak, tries to listen. Can hear only clicks and growls and, sometimes, a sort of rumbling humming that makes her insides feel warmed over. She finds herself moving toward it, searching it out like a little animal. Sometimes she is sure she can feel the press of sharp talons along her skin.

And then one morning she coasts back into consciousness. She can move her hands – well, one of them – can sit up, can see. In the shallow moat of her unconscious, she’d crafted her own narrative. A hospital, surely. A refugee camp. Maybe not in California, maybe not even on Earth. The tent is a surprise, the turian sleeping a few feet from her a downright shock. She stares at him, frozen, until he pulls himself drowsily from his cot, until he opens his fanged mouth and speaks.

And then there’s a flurry of activity. Tests and prodding and food that makes her vision wobble and her stomach turn over. It’s harder not to think about her mom or Anita or humans or Earth, but she tries not to. Corrine expands her chest then contracts it, takes the kind of deep breathing, whole body breaths that Anita used to do on her yoga mat in the morning. She flexes the fingers on her good hand and ignores the heavy pain in her bad hand. She tries to grow accustomed to the metallic flanging that comes almost shrieking through her translator. She tries not to flinch every time she sees one of them.

Corrine remembers flipping through the back index of her middle school biology textbook, dogearing the page where the drawings of the other races began. She’d skim the sketchy outlines with her fingertips. She liked the quarians the best, the strange lines of their bodies and the soft shimmer of their suits. Used to sketch them in the margins of her notebooks. The hanar too. Would marvel at the light flowing down their bodies, wondering what they felt like, smelled like. Would find a jellyfish sprawled out in the sand and wonder if they were some distant cousin, marvel at the tight knitting of the universe. 

She’d never draw them, but even when was older she’d find herself circling back, eventually, to the turians. The very last page of the index. They were frightening in a way that held her attention. Primal looking, strong. Their armor – and human textbooks always only showed them in their armor – like a hard outer shell. Corrine has only seen General Victus in his armor. And he is all those things that had ignited an almost prey-like instinct in her all those years ago. But he is also composed, clinical. Polite, even. So obsessively regimented that she finds herself easing off, loosening up. HE takes a shape in her mind’s eye that starts to push at the contours of those index drawings, at the contours of her fear. 

“Do we have any idea what they are? The reapers?” It’s a risk, she knows, asking a question like that after his departure the night before. His sudden, wildly out of character anger at her assessment of Palaven’s surface.

General Victus turns to look at her. She watches his mandibles twitch. That means something, she knows, but isn’t sure what. She often watches him talk. As covertly as she can. He rarely talks to her but spends a great deal of time talking to others. The doctor who visits her daily, a rotating cast of characters on his Omnitool, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, to himself. And he is always moving that part of his face. But the tempo and degree changes. She knows it’s a language like the humming she sometimes hears. That translator app she downloaded on a whim coming in handy in ways it never did on earth. It glitches sometimes, drops words and when it does, she can feel the full scale of his growl.

But today he hasn’t walked out on her outright. Which is an improvement and makes her think that this quick, coarse twitch might mean something good. “Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means yes and no.” He says, firmly. Corrine scoffs and then immediately regrets it, eyes widening. But Victus makes no move to leave. He’s just looking at her and his eyes strike her as so familiar she finds herself drawn into his gaze. He sighs, pushes his rations around on his plate. “I can tell you what I know.” She blinks at him, surprised. And there’s a tenderness about the way he's choosing his words that she doesn’t miss. And she feels warm. She feels grateful even if she isn’t entirely sure why.

That night she watches him undress in the tent. Tries to look at him, really look at him for the first time. He towers in the darkness. A looming shadow. Animal, frightening. _Comforting_. Something else. The musculature of him, the sharp lines. A predator’s body. Her own feels very soft when she looks at him, fragile. Broken so easily into pieces. She feels especially fragile now. And she clings to just the idea of him. Wants him suddenly to stay in this tent forever. Right here. In the twilight darkness, his armor in a pile at his feet. No one’s told her and she hasn’t asked but she’s sure that he is the reason she’s still alive. 

It’s hard to look at her own body. Tributaries of black and blue that run all along her legs. Bloody burst veins and sutures straining to hold the tears in her skin together. She tries not to look. Shies away when she undresses, closes her eyes in the shower so as not to catch her reflection in the warped metal. Everyone around her is a turian and she learns, painfully, just how much she used the bodies of others to reflect on her own. She has no reference point now. Feels sometimes as though she might sprout talons of her own. 

In her dreams, her body is everything. She feels blindly, desperately down it. Then out into the darkness. Her lungs are sealed shut, collapsed, and her chest heaves with that sharp, screaming need for air. The dreams terrify her. More than even the sounds of the fighting outside the tent and so she tries to stay awake. Fights sleep. She wants to pace, but she feels, so often, like she is trying her luck with the general. Knows, instinctually, that smaller and quieter she is, the better. So she curls up and counts. Counts to a thousand and then back down to one. Tries to remember the plot of every movie she’s ever seen and play it back in her head until her body starts to ache, until sleep pulls her roughly under. 

“I can’t sleep either.” He tells her one morning over breakfast. And then his mandibles flutter and he rocks back just slightly, like he’s surprised he’s said it at all.

That night she watches him sleep. Watches his chest rise and fall and she wonders how much he’s been watching her to know she can’t sleep, how quietly he’s laid there for her not to notice that he isn’t either. She wonders, blinking out at him from under her thin blanket, if he’s awake now. A rattle of gunfire pulls her hard from her throat. She cries out, muffling the sound with her palm. They sound so close now, almost just outside the tent and she can feel her heart start to pound. “It’s alright,” he says, voice muffled, almost dreamy. She isn’t sure if he’s even all the way awake. If it’s saying it to her or himself or like a prayer out into the chilled night air. “It’s alright.”

“You can call me Adrien.” He tells her one morning, apropos of nothing and she feels a strange, misplaced flutter inside of her. When he returns, hours later, they sit silently across from each other at the table. Like they have for more than a month. But when she glances furtively up to look at him, Corrine finds him looking back. His mandibles flutter. Almost a smile.

She can tell before he says anything. Can tell by the way his mandibles quickly twitch, by the sudden sharp clang of his subvocals, that what he has found is horrible.

She knows these things now, if not about the others on the base then at least about him. And it freezes her for a moment, this reaction. Because he seems to be, above all, a man accustomed to horror. And then she begs, because she has to know now. How bad, how awful. _Please, please ,please, please please._

She thinks about stupid things first maybe because they are easy. Street vendor elote. TV playing softly late at night, half-watched. The crisp coolness of the night after leaving the bar, softened by booze. The sand still warm from the sun even after dark, the water cool as it rushes over her toes. Her neighbors gossiping in the hall loud enough for them to eavesdrop. And she cries just at the idea of them. Gone forever. Cries big, humiliating tears that she knows will make Adrien uncomfortable. And he is, visibly so. But he stays, she can feel him still in the tent even as she turns away from him. She can hear him say something soft, something just below what she can make out when, hours later, he crosses the tent to turn out the light.

And it’s there, in the dark, when the real terror settles in. She tries to wrap her head around the number. Tries to imagine a room filled with _millions._ Then tries to imagine them all dead. She wonders if Long Beach looks like Menae now, wonders if she’ll ever breathe that air again. Infinity tumbles down onto her. Never and always and nothing. Absolutes that she can’t fathom but has to now try. 

The darkness inside of her seems to spread. Like a heroine in a Victorian novel, she takes to her bed and lets herself sink. Her thoughts race and then the thoughts become fevers and their white hot heat goes rolling down her body until one morning she wakes up to find Adrien standing above her and all she can think to say is: “I think I’m dying.”

“You’re not,” his talons are cool on her forehead, his voice as steady as it always is.

“I think I am.”

“And what if you were?”

She sniffles. “I don’t want to.” She swallows hard. “I would miss…I…I” Panic spikes in her chest. Frantic thoughts clawing through the heat in her brain. “I don’t want to. I’m afraid.”

“Fear is natural. Necessary.”

She’s sure she can hear him purring, can feel the vibrations against her skin. Her body settles. She breathes cool air into it. “I feel delirious.”

“You are. You have a fever. We don’t have the medicine to treat you.”

“So shortages will kill me?”

Adrien chuckles. “No. Not yet.” She wants to tell him that isn’t comforting, wants to tell him not to stop purring. _Please don’t stop purring._ But her mouth feels too dry to open, her head pounding now and instead she reaches for his hands, curls her fingers around his. They’re so much bigger and rougher, end in sharp talons like a bird’s. But she holds on, desperately and, after a beat of silence, can feel his other hand come to her shoulder. The talon scratches a little on her skin, a prick of sensation.

“I’m afraid.” Her voice has gone quiet, ragged.

He starts to hum again, the vibrations brushing through her body. She tightens her grip on his hand, lets her eyes flutter closed. In the darkness, the heat feels brighter. His talons brush along her neck, her jaw. “It’s alright, Corrine, it’s going to be alright.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	5. SSV Normandy - Trebia System - Apien Crest

Adrien doesn’t like ships. Doesn’t like flying. Never has. He grew up on Cipritine’s north shore. A hardened, industrial area nothing like the long crystalline beaches in the neighborhoods where he would raise his son. The squat prefab where he and his sisters spent the lion’s share of their time opened up to the sun-scorched tarmac of Cipritine’s main transport hub. In the evenings, in the slow time after dinner, they would watch sometimes from the family’s narrow back porch as the shuttles would go whirring up into the sky, little cyclones of dust and sand their wake, noxious fumes drifting over through the family’s open windows. A smell that never really lifted. That would remind his grizzled father of his service out in the Traverse, hobbled and glassy-eyed as he retreated in on himself. Adrien remembers, the first night in his apartment with the woman who would become his wife, unearthing an old tunic from the bottom of a moving box, one that he wore in high school, and the smell of exhaust filling the room. He can smell it now, even though he knows that isn’t possible, here in the chrome hold of a human ship. Home feels both close and impossibly far away. Simmering just under his skin; lost forever, a singed crater on a dying planet.

The ship drifts a little to the left. Almost imperceptible but he can feel it, feel himself tense against it. A couple Alliance soldiers scurry past him. Green. He can tell by the buzzy, almost manic way they whisper to each other as they pass through the CIC toward the back elevators. The wide, almost reverent berth they give him makes his plates itch. _Primarch_ sits heavy on his shoulders. At first, he thought the careful distance was simply because of his race, but he’s watched Garrus move easily through this ship for long enough that he knows now it’s his title He watches the two young navymen disappear behind the quiet swish of metallic doors, turns back to face the bridge.

Adrien likes war ships even less than transports. Even on a human ship, he can feel the echoes of the world he knows so well. Like a language he can intuit but not finesse. It’s the marine in him, he knows. That’s the root of his discomfort It’s not the tight spaces – he’s been in more narrow fox holes than he can count – but a bright, visceral unease at the space between him and solid ground. In a machine he barely understands with a human at the helm. Adrien eyes the pilot. The pilot eyes him back.

“Turian design.” Adrien glances over at the woman beside him. Commander Shepard is, even in turian space, a legend. He’s still deciding if she’s quite what he expected. “Some kind of collaborative project.” Her eyes slide over to look at him, one corner of her mouth ticking up. “Or so they tell me.”

Adrien flutters his mandibles, turning back to the bright blackness of space beyond the edge of the ship. “Is this the part where I monologue about interspecies cooperation? About the good of the galaxy?”

Shepard snorts. “Please don’t.” Adrien chuckles, relaxing his shoulders a little. The ship may fray his nerves, but he has a hard time not liking the woman who commands it. Sees himself reflected easily in her. Rough around the edges. Hardened by war. He wonders, glancing again over at her, if he would have felt this way before Corrine. If there was something in that time they shared in the tent that desensitized him to human presence, softened all those old edges that the First Contact War made so sharp. Or maybe it’s the reapers. Behind him, he can hear the quiet hum of the Normandy’s starmap. They’re in nearly every system. He hadn’t known that until he boarded the ship, looked in quiet horror at the blinking makers of their movement. The enemy of my enemy. “Accommodations alright?” She doesn’t look at him when she speaks, standing at parade rest, eyes turned sharply toward the stars whizzing past them.

“Adequate.” She only nods. Shepard doesn’t talk with her hands like Corrine does, seems to think hard and long before she says anything at all. Blunt orders, short questions, the occasional dry quip. And her voice is different. Harsher to his ears. Even through the translator, he can tell the difference. The commander draws out her vowels, blunts the ends of each word. He hadn’t noticed before the way Corrine’s words would meander, sometimes chirp. Each sentence ending in a lilt like a question, even and especially if it wasn’t one. They’re both from Earth. The Commander hadn’t told him so. Garrus had. By way of explanation when she’d left their mess table abruptly his first morning on the ship when the talk turned toward casualties. He doesn’t know much about the planet, but Adrien has a difficult time imagining Shepard on those sun-soaked beaches where he slots Corrine in his thoughts now. There’s a delicate something to her that seems to fit there, among the rays of the sun. He can imagine her sitting in the sand, water kissing the strange tips of her toes. He’s been trying lately, now surrounded by humans with the same thin skin as hers, to imagine her without bruises. It is, he knows, a colossal waste of his time.

The Commander turns on her heel, heading back out toward the CIC with a single, curt nod. She’s harsh in ways he finds familiar; in ways that make him now understand perhaps why he found Corrine so foreign. Physical, tangible ways. The top of Corrine’s head barely reaches his chest plate; Shepard stands level with his shoulders. Thickly corded muscle under her thin, almost translucent skin. The color of her hair in the same family as Corrine’s but harsher too, brighter. He thinks, eyeing her as she disappears around the starmap, that she might be able to take him in a fight. And he finds that comforting. Until he doesn’t. Until he’s thinking again of the marine on Luna Base, the startled whites of his eyes. Of Shanxi, red blood running rivulets down his armor. Of his finger on the trigger, Corrine half in, half out of the scion’s corpse. Of the way it would have been easy to kill her. He thinks, shifting on his feet, that perhaps the spirits are punishing him.

“So it’s true then.” Adrien jolts out of his thoughts. The pilot is looking back at him, adjusting his ballcap, “all turians _do_ have sticks up their asses.” Adrien straightens, mandibles twitching. The pilot turns away from him, a quick hit of vertigo as they hit FTL. Adrien digs his talons into the soles of his shoes.

It’s funny how some things translate across species. Age for one. A greying at the temples, a certain air that Adrien remembers seeing in the old tesserae players along the boardwalks on Cipritine’s long southern shore. The doctor has that same air, her fringe the color of gunmetal, a soft pulling at the skin beside her eyes. Chakwas, he remembers. A name so foreign to his ears it would be hard not to.

“She’ll make it.” She says, as she sidles up beside him just outside the med bay. It’s night in the ship’s artificial ecosystem. The mess empty save for a lone woman nursing a cup of coffee. Save for Adrien, and now the doctor.

He looks back through the medbay’s glass window, back at Corrine. She’s in a bed now, which feels proper, right, even if it’s beginning to look like a tomb. Her skin sallow, bruising around her mouth from where they’ve intubated her. She hasn’t opened her eyes in a week. Closed them one morning on Menae and kept them closed. He finds it hard to remember their color, fights a sudden frightening urge to go and try and shake her awake. “I would consider it,” he says, straightening up, hands clasped behind his back, “a personal favor if you devoted as many resources to her as possible.”

Chakwas gives him a strange look and he feels that strangeness echo inside himself. Like he’s just revealed himself, though he isn’t sure what he’s even revealing. What he really even means. “All of my patients are a priority.”

“Of course.” They turn back to the glass, silence sitting thick between them now. Corrine’s arms lay limp at her sides, her injured hand caged in a painful looking metal brace, a bandage wrapped tightly around her right knee. There’s no blanket on the cot and Adrien shivers. It doesn’t matter if she’s cold, he reminds himself, she can’t feel a thing now. “Was it something we did?”

Chakwas laughs. A sound that comes lightly through the translator. “On the contrary. Your doctor should be commended. I’m not sure how I would have fared with a lone wounded turian in my care. Before Garrus that is. Triage, it seems, cuts across biology. Useful now, I suppose, that we’re all at war.”

“We did the best we could for her.” He feels himself tightening, a strange sort of feeling blooming in his chest. One he can’t name. A brother to fear, a cousin to longing. He doesn’t know where it’s come from. 

“I don’t imagine the dextrose rations helped but she’s in good shape considering the condition you found her in.”

“Do you…” He clears his throat. “Do you have any idea when she might wake up.” His voice sounds small to his own ears and he hopes that doesn’t translate, that his Omnitool shores it up before sending it out.

“No. And I doubt it’ll be aboard this ship.” Adrien turns to look at her, stiff again “We can keep her alive here, but it would be better to transport her to Citadel when we offload your wounded marines. They have more resources there. Are much better suited to treating her.”

Adrien’s chest tightens. A strange, claustrophobic feeling settling over him. “Yes of course.” His mandibles shiver. “May I go see her?”

“Primarch, you hardly have to ask my permission.”

The antiseptic smell soothes him. A reminder that this is real medicine, not just what they’d managed to cobble together on the field. Evidence, something tangible, that she is back with her own people. That they’ll know what to do with her. Her own people. His chest tightens. He needs rest, real food, a hot shower. His thoughts feel crazed, nearly delirious. So much has happened in the past 48 hours. The foundations of his world shaken up. Palaven now at his feet, his responsibility. _I’m just a soldier,_ he’d wanted to tell the Commander when she’d showed up, Garrus in tow, at their barricades, to tell him about Fedorian, _I only know how to fight._ This then, feels at least like something he can manage. Something small.

He stands over her and then, glancing over to make sure that Chakwas is no longer standing beyond the window, runs his talons through her fringe again. It moves like water across his knuckles. She looks smaller here that he remembers her being. Her skin translucent in the cold light of the medbay. Without thinking, he slips his dogtags over his head, winding them around his wrist before leaning down until he can smell the nip of soap on her skin, still bruised like an overripe fruit. He lifts her head, gently as he can, the ventilator makes a sharp sucking sound at the movement, and slips them around her neck. It’s a clear violation of regulation. A small sort of clerical thing that could get him effectively court marshaled. Though Adrien supposes it doesn’t much matter now. The military courts have been disbanded. And he’s Primarch, he reminds himself. But more than that, it feels like some violation of the person he’d been even months before. Giving something, _anything_ to a human? Outrageous. Adrien supposes that doesn’t matter much either. The tags lay gently on her skin, tucked in the valley below her collarbone. There isn’t a place like that on a turian’s body. Nothing of her body reminds him of his own and yet they’re both still here. Still alive even after the reapers took the moon. Adrien takes a step back, walks his eyes down her body, then back up, to the glint of his dogtags against her skin. He hasn’t the slightest idea why he’s done this, just that nothing makes sense anymore. This as much as anything else. It’ll be good that she go to the Citadel, Adrien thinks. Something new. Something safer. Away from the war. For now, at least She isn’t his responsibility anymore. The feeling breaks like a wave over him. He reaches out. The metallic door whooshes open, Chakwas’ clacking heels against the metal floor. He retracts his hand. Corrine shifts, fingers flexing, eyelids fluttering. He wishes he could remember the color of her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	6. Citadel - Widow - Serpent Nebula

She feels it like her heartbeat. Pulsing. All around her. And it feels almost like flesh, hot and smooth like another person beside her, consuming her. But it’s too soft when she touches it, gives too easily. Corrine presses her fingers to her palms, checks to see if maybe she has forgotten her own body. But even with the jolt of pain she feels herself firm to the touch. The pulsing comes closer. She can feel it against her back, her thighs, feel it brushing along her shoulders. An amoeba quality as it undulates beneath her fingertips. And it should scare her, this thing she can’t see or really even touch, but it doesn’t, even as her mouth fills with the hollow taste of no air, even as her lungs hang useless and heavy beneath her ribs. No panic, no fear. Just a quiet simmering something. Confusion, maybe. It’s hard to tell. Her brain feels as useless and heavy as her lungs.

Corrine blinks her eyes open, finds her vision a little stilted, a little blurry. Like she’s looking through a half-shattered screen, one big crack down the center. She tries to wipe at them, but her arms are stiff at her sides. There’s a tube coming out from the inside of each elbow, thick, almost crude, a scabbed red ring around each incision. Corrine can see air blowing through the tubes, can feel an ache in her muscles where it must lead. Her mind drifts across old textbooks, tv shows, wrapped in blankets, gazing out at the blue light of the screen, hand wrapped around beer or wine or…something. Something. She thinks of emboli and deep sea diving. Tries to flex her fingers and finds that amoeba warmth coming closer, pressing harder. Corrine looks down her own body, finds herself nude, slick. Blood she thinks at first, but it’s too orange, too thin, to be her own blood. She feels a flicker of something at the back of her brain but with a rush of air, the thought vanishes, that metallic taste in her mouth turns to grit. The warmth pulses again, but when she looks up, she doesn’t find an amoeba, something instead like a chrysalis, the thin blur of the wing of a butterfly. Cut into a shape like it was formed just for her. Beyond it, a grid like a hive. Hexagonal patterns stretching up and up and up. On forever, everything bathed in the same sick orange as her skin.

Her skin’s tacky when she touches it, fingertips sticking, pulling a membrane with them. And she is so singularly focused on that membrane that the scream, at first, barely registers. But then it echoes, triples along the sides of the hive. And Corrine’s never heard a scream like that, from a pitch at the very center of a person. A scream that turns her inside out and then a gurgle, like a bubbling. Something rushes down over her, that pale not-blood and if her lungs weren’t sewn so tightly shut Corrine would scream, would scream until the sound turned her inside out too. And then she sees the hand, just a shadow of it through the gloss of the wing. Three fingers, sharp ends that prick through the fine membrane of the pod, make it twist and shudder. She knows him before he even comes into view even as she has to fight through the haze in her own brain. Without armor now, just the ridges of his plates, the strong sinews of his body. Mandibles fluttering back to reveal the sharp points of his teeth. Shanxi, right? They always show that on the news in the fall. _The x anniversary of the Shanxi Massacre._ How many dead? How many? She can’t remember. It hardly mattered then, catching the broadcast at the laundromat, the hair salon, loitering in someone else’s kitchen. It would pan without fail over the ruin of the colony, over burnt prefabs and red stained walls, the ghosts of firing squads. And then over of Palaven, whole streets a mass of marching turians. In step, perfectly, always. Then their teeth, their claws. He’s inside now, pulled into the pod with her, so close she can feel the heat of his body. That sickly orange running down his teeth, his mandibles. She reaches for him, takes hold. The leather of his skin smooth and solid. He opens his mouth, mandibles fluttering. Corrine opens her eyes.

She gasps into the bright light, scrambling for purchase, finds linen where she expects flesh, softness where she expects only boiling heat. The room comes slowly into view, her eyes adjusting. Corrine stares up at a smooth chrome ceiling, her chest stuttering, heart pounding loudly in her ears. “Oh.” Corrine flinches, backing away from the sound of the voice. “You’re awake.” The asari comes in through an open door, a datapad in one hand, dressed in the kind of sleek, white tunic that Corrine’s only seen in Citadel medical dramas on tv. Corrine brings a hand to her chest, finds herself comforted by the way her heart beats against her palm. She glances furtively around. It’s a small room, only a little wider than the cot where she sits, one wall just a pane of glass, the light still too bright for her eyes to adjust and see what’s beyond it. The air smells like nothing, so sterile and clean it barely registers at all.

Corrine feels along her arms, unsure if it had been a dream or a vision or an omen, tinged in the strange light of memory. Her fingers catch something in her right and she glances down to find a narrow tube in the main vein, flush with yellow liquid. “Nutrition.” The woman sets her datapad down on the table beside the bed. “We’ve been trying to flush the dextro protein from your body.” Corrine just blinks at her. She feels, as surreptitiously as she can, down her body. It’s all there. Bandaged and tender but it’s all there. The asari cocks her head, the sage color of her eyes reminds Corrine of her mother. Her chest tightens. One of their neighbors had been an asari, Batha if Corrine remembers the name on the mailbox right. She lived three doors down, used to play music in the evenings that would drift down the hall. _She’s so beautiful,_ Anita said once, a little stoned out on their windowsill, catching sight of her as she stepped off the tram, _like god the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen._ Corrine feels like she might be sick, like her heart is going to come up out through her throat. The room wobbles. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” The asari reaches again for her datapad. “Can you understand me?” Corrine looks over to the corner of the room. Expects, in some quiet part of her brain, to see Adrien there, sitting on his cot, half out of his armor. Quiet, thinking, his talons clasped between his knees.

She can walk but not well. Feels dazed like a bird that’s hit a window. All together, mostly. Ten toes, ten fingers, four limbs. Her head on straight even though her thoughts have gone quiet. The wheelchair they have her in makes her feel small, the view from the window in the patient lounge even more so. But Corrine can’t stop looking at it. A long canal that flows beneath the hospital, flanked by terraces of green, stretching upward into the reflective glare of the windows on the buildings.

The canal curves up at the end, disappears behind the projection of the sky, fluffed clouds drifting against an almost perfect approximation of blue. It curves around, she knows, from the movies she’s seen. Knows that there’s a whole other part of the city above her. Corrine tries not to think about drifting through space, about the dense darkness of it. No up or down. Not here, not beyond, not anywhere that she could get to before her air ran out. She tries not to think of anything at all, shifts a little in the chair, the soft linen pants they’ve given her a little too big, the shirt a little too tight. Corrine tightens her grip on the cup in her lap. Some kind of asari tea, bright, almost bitter. The warmth feels good against her hands. They’ve reset the bones in the one. It’s swollen now, black and blue from knuckle to wrist, but the meds they’ve got her on keep the pain a dull, muted ache. Her right knee aches too and that’s another thing Corrine doesn’t want to think about: the slate grey tinge of the skin around the side of her knee, tendrils of dull gold drifting a few inches up her thigh. She tightens her grip again on the cup, watching a few cars zoom past the window. A few feet away a salarian coughs. Corrine glances over. She hasn’t seen too many of them before. There were plenty of asari in Los Angeles, a few krogan bouncers at bars, but aside from a few salarian doctors who made routine appearances on local news, she’s only seen them in movies. There’s a strangeness to their amphibian bodies that Corrine has a hard time comprehending. This one has an almost purplish tint to his skin, spots like freckles up the sides of his face. He catches her looking and smiles. Corrine waves, retracts her hand when she realizes that she’s done it with the bandaged one. _Where are you from,_ she wants to ask. Can now with the hospital’s new Omnitool, its better translator. But when she thinks of Earth, its charred surface, reapers drifting through the shells of its cities, she sinks a little further back into her chair, looking back out at the Presidium. Loaded questions these days. Nobody asks where you’re from. Whiplash really, the way people seem to shy away from talking about the war in the same rooms where footage of it plays on a loop on the vid screens.

“Beautiful day, huh?” Her nurse comes up beside her chair. Nyxrias. She thinks, trying to coast over her medicated fog to earlier that morning. When Corrine had blinked herself back from the vision of Adrien and the asari had introduced herself. “Lots of sunshine.”

“Does the weather ever change out there?”

Nyxrias shrugs, crouches down to wrap a sensor around Corrine’s good arm. They’ve been taking her blood pressure every few hours, Corrine doesn’t ask why. “Sometimes.” Nyxrias glances at her datapad. “People like variety.” Corrine flinches as the sensor tightens, reaches up to take hold of the metal around her neck. Dog tags, she assumes. His, she hopes, though she can’t read the blunt, structured script across them. Another thing she doesn’t want to think about. How he got her here, where he is now. If the dog tags mean he’s dead. And if he is, why they’ve been given to her. Nyxrias glances up, looks at her face then down at the dog tags and back. “That turian is serious about looking after you.” She chuckles. “That’s always how it is. Turians get crazy about human women. It’s the tension, I swear. Hate and love and all that.”

Corrine blinks at her, releasing the dogtags. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The sensor beeps. Nyxrias unwinds the cord and stands. “Primarch Victus.”

Corrine tenses. “Victus? He’s alive?”

Nyxrias snorts. “Very.” She comes around to stand in front of the chair, the artificial sun at her back. “Gonna check your eyes.” She says, leaning a little down. Her fingers cool against Corrine’s cheeks. “You’re lucky, really.” She stands, types something on her datapad. “It’s a good time to have someone like that looking out for you.”

Corrine frowns. Her thoughts are so slow, nothing connecting. She feels a quick rush of relief, a prickle of fear. The solarian beside her struggles to his feet, helped along by a human nurse back toward the patient wing. She opens her mouth. She has so many questions, so many things she wants to, _needs to,_ ask. But instead, all she manages is: “What’s a Primarch?”

Nyxrias squeezes her shoulder. “Why don’t you get some rest?”

_The turians are a highly militarized meritocracy made up of 27 citizenship tiers within which individual turians can be promoted and demoted throughout their lifetime. The position of Primarch – first created at the end of the Unification Wars in 449 BCE – is the highest rank in the turian meritocracy. While each individual colonization cluster has their own Primarch, they must each answer to the Primarch of Palaven who can, in times of crises, act as the single diplomatic voice of the turian people. He is the Commander in Chief of the turian military and wields almost total legislative power._

Corrine scrolls down the page, past hi-res pictures of turian military insignia, medals, trying to parse the way it’s all making her feel. She’s still foggy on meds, whole body trembling with what the doctors had assured her was just the aftereffects of dehydration, dextro poisoning. She feels homesick, like a child might, but in all directions, for everything.

Corrine rolls onto her side, careful not to jostle her knee. She watches the cars speed past her window, down toward the glittering lights of the Wards. The Citadel looks loud, bustling. All those lights, all those cars. In her room she can only hear the whoosh of the air filtration system, the occasional beep of the machine they’ve attached to a spot just above her heart. She’d started the night searching for pictures of Menae but found one of the charred corpses of three turian marines so graphic it had made her feel vaguely ill. She’d scrolled through nothing much after that. News feeds that oscillated wildly between op-eds on the reapers, military strategy reports, and listicles of _top ten dishes to include when you have a turian on your summer bbq guest list!_

Corrine chews on the skin beside her thumb, watches the cursor blink in the search bar. She isn’t sure exactly what has her so afraid, now that she knows that he isn’t dead. Afraid, maybe, of her own reaction. To seeing him again, even just over the extranet, even buffered by the anonymity of a news article. The metal of his tags have warmed next to her skin, she imagines that it would have been boiling against his, remembers the furnace feeling of his talons against her forehead. The machine beeps. Her knee twinges. She frowns at the memory of the dream it brings, flexes the fingers of her good hand, lets them hover over the translucent screen of her omni. Corrine opens the search bar.

_insect pod_

_insect pod for humans_

_giant hive_

_giant hive reapers_

_reapers humans kidnapping_

Nothing. Or nothing relevant, at least. Corrine closes her omni, exhales, lays back down onto the cot. She stares out at the Citadel, at the streaks of light the cars leave in their wake. A whole world untouched. She wonders where he is, where everyone else is, in all the places where the world has already ended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	7. SSV Normandy - Aralakh System - Krogan DMZ

Adrien's quarters are small. His shoulders loom and when he stretches out his arm his talons brush the walls. But they’re quiet. Not even the whir of the ship’s engine breaking the thick wall of recycled silence inside. Which he appreciates. Because it helps him forget about the vacuum of space that separates him now from terra.

In his first few nights aboard the Normandy, he’d lain awake thinking of all the ways he would be completely useless if the ship were boarded, if it went careening into a reaper, a planet. All those years of tactical training, decades of hard-fought experience. Useless. As useless as the galley cook. Can’t make a tactical retreat on a ship, can’t flank an enemy, can barely even shoot a gun without the kickback rattling around in the thin gravity. He’s schooled himself out of it after not too long, let the fear retreat, let his stiff calm fill him up again. But it’s still a futile endeavor, sleeping. The careful composure he keeps in the war room frays by the time he drags himself back to this narrow room. Sleep feels treacherous. Irresponsible. So most often he lays on his back, arms folded, his feet dangling over the end of a cot so clearly not built for his body, and stares up at the ceiling. Chrome. Clean. He’s never been somewhere like this.

His home on Palaven – a place that feels so strange now even in his memory – was full of windows. Wide stucco arches that let the light curve golden through them, let whoever stood before them get a full view of the blanched flatlands that lay beyond the city on one side, the long line of the coast on the other. Soft breezes fluttering gossamer curtains. It seems like a fantasy now. As much as the trenches seem like a fantasy now too. If a different one. The other side of his coin. Grit and ash, the hard earth beneath his feet. A sense of realness that escapes him on Palaven. A sense of purpose. Like his body was meant for it, his mind too. The kickback of a shotgun, the steady rumble of a fight, the clear, almost singular feeling in his brain when its sole use becomes war, survival. There’s a purity in that.

This is neither. This is stripped of both action and comfort. Unfamiliar but not in a way that hones any of his baser instincts. He can’t relax, can’t fully commit to not relaxing either. He feels locked away somehow, entombed. The relatively isolated spot Shepard put him up doesn’t help either. His little room far away from any of the others. He had, at first, through that to be purposeful. Some sort of anti-turian sentiment. Until, of course, he’d spied the Commander brushing her fingers absently across Vakarian’s fringe. _That_ had been an interesting development. One that he’s quietly teased Garrus about on more than on occasion, most often from across the war room’s map, subvocals flanging. One that has his thoughts turning back to Menae, back to the smooth quiet of his tent and the spot just by the entrance. She had only occupied it for weeks, but she remains carved in his memory there. It becomes easy to think of her. More and more until he can’t have a thought without one of her chasing it. Even standing in the war room, watching the reapers advance away from the edges and into the center of his galaxy, his eyes will drift over to the stuttering hologram of the Citadel and then further, much further, toward Earth.

He isn’t thinking about her back in his quarters after the summit, sitting on the edge of his cot. Ire still spiking, talons still tense from curling into fists. Genophages and dalatrasses and everything that doesn’t matter in the long arc of what this war will mean, could mean. His composure slipped just at the end, when he’d pounded his fists onto the table. Amazing that the world could be so swiftly, so obviously ending and they would still be debating policy, diplomacy. Incredible. He takes a long pull of brandy, holds it out so it catches the pale fluorescent light of the room. Even in the anemic light, it glitters. Reminds him of the deep ochre colors of home. Reminds him of her hair. There she is, drifting again toward his thoughts. Adrien scoffs, resting his arms on his spread knees, letting his head droop. He swirls the brandy in his glass, watching the patterns it leaves along the surface, and wonders if Corrine has ever seen a salarian up close. If she’s ever wandered the long halls of a ship. Spirits, what his wife would think of him now. Surely laughing from the beyond, watching her old love think so often of a human. _And how do you think of her,_ he imagines her saying, mandibles fluttering smugly, _in what ways._ In what ways, indeed. Adrien leans back, rolls his neck, reaches up to knead a sore spot along his carapace. The last fight he had with his wife was about humans. Funny that he should be remembering that now, should be remembering it at all. He’d tucked it deep within the recesses of his memory. But now, light with the liquor inside of him, it comes back easily.

It had been on the steps of the Cipritine National Gallery. One of the city’s rare overcast days. A controversial show, all of human art. _Why shouldn’t we try to understand them,_ she’d insisted when she presented him with that tickets that morning, _why shouldn’t we try to find common ground._ He’d been affronted by that. Affronted by the whole thing. By the throngs of turians meandering through the gallery, just young enough to not have spilled blood on Luna Base, too young to remember the humiliating dressing down the Council gave the Hierarchy after Shanxi. Adrien left the gallery before he’d seen a single painting. A regret now. So deep and smooth it feels like part of his own musculature. The accident had been only months later. Not all that far, really, from those gallery steps. It’s probably ash now, a smoldering crate. Like everything on Earth. Adrien opens his Omnitool.

She’s just static at first. Pieces of her missing, pixelated. A distorted voice crackling over a distorted image. And then, all at once, Corrine comes into view. It startles him, really, the way she is suddenly rendered in full color, so clear he can see her veins pressing blue against the skin of her shoulders. And he is so busy trying to take stock of her here, in full color, in front of him, that he doesn’t immediately notice the way she looks fundamentally different than he remembers. His mandibles twitch and he leans back to take her more fully in. Her face is even now, a pleasing symmetry with only a few bruises remaining just around her jawline. And she looks soft, a thought that startles him, that sends his mandibles twitching again. But the assessment is a good one. The curves of her cheeks, her lips, her jaw make her look soft. Her fringe, the smooth quality of her skin. Entirely foreign but not unappealing. Not in the slightest. “You look different.”

She flinches and he immediately regrets what he’s said. “Oh.” Her lips twitch in a way he doesn’t understand. “I hope different is…” Corrine takes her uninjured hand and mangles her fringe, twisting it around her fingers.

“Good.” He says, though he isn’t sure if that’s what he should be saying, what she would expect him to say. Adrien has become so used to soldiers hanging on his every word that this, _this,_ feels like entirely new territory.

“Oh.” Her lips curl up. “Good then.”

He shifts. This feels strange, awkward. Adrien feels both very young and very old. Older, certainly, than her. Something he had not considered before. He feels almost predatory. Calling her like this. While she convalesces at a hospital, her world aflame; while he speaks for the whole of the Turian hierarchy. But before long she shifts a little closer to the camera, settling with her strangely bent knees beneath her and exhales. The sound is as soft as she looks and it unfurls something inside of him. He exhales with her, lets his body soften too. It feels intimate, to sit quietly like this. It becomes easy to ask what he had sworn he would not. “How are you feeling?”

Her body tightens. He can see it. Every muscle under her think skin going rigid. “I’m fine.”

“Are you in pain?”

“No, not really.” He wonders if the lie is for her or for him, watches as she cocks her head, narrows her eyes like she’s trying to get a better look at him. “Are you safe?” He sees her shake her head, her fringe shifting along her shoulders. “That’s a stupid question.”

‘It is.” He teases, the air in the room lightening.

She laughs and then that silence falls between them again. He wishes he knew what to say to her, wishes that he could think of anything to say at all. She shifts again on her hips, hand inching up the fabric of her shirt. “I…um. I have your dogtags. I’m not sure how I got them. Some kind of mistake “

“Keep them.”

Her eyes widen, bigger than turian eyes could ever get. “Oh. Are you sure?”

“Yes. Give them back to me when this is over.” He watches her too many fingers curls around the metal where his name is engraved. It jolts through him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3 
> 
> Oh! And come find me on my new [tumblr](https://junkbabelna.tumblr.com/) if you're so inclined!


	8. Citadel - Widow - Serpent Nebula

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I've said in every update I've made on this website in the past couple of months: please excuse the worse than normal editing. I too live in this 2020 hellscape.

Corrine catches her own reflection on the way back to her room from the patient lounge. Strong enough now to not need a wheelchair, but with a nurse still always at her side, hand twitching toward her anytime she slows, stumbles. Which she does when they head toward the watery glass of the sliding and Corrine comes face to face with a version of herself that fragile, so _young,_ she’s almost unrecognizable. “You doing alright?” The nurse, an older Salarian woman with a near perpetual patient smile and a slow, smooth way of talking, touches her arms gently with one hand.

Corrine blinks at her, then shakes it off, straightening up. “I’m fine, sorry.” She glances back as the nurse leads her down the hall toward her room. Back at the ghost of a woman that had so spooked her.

It’s not that she hasn’t seen herself since she came here – every night she watches her darkened reflection float disembodied over the glimmering lights of the Citadel before she drifts to sleep – it’s just that she hasn’t really _looked_ before now. She looks again in the narrow mirror at one end of her room. It looks warped from her angle on the bed and so she stands, the metal floor cold against her bare feet. Her eyes flutter closed. She can feel the mirror in front of her, feel the weight of her own reflection just behind her closed eyes. The quiet in the room is consuming. Just the sound of the filtering air, her own breathing. Nothing gets past those sliding doors, the window beside her bed. The bustle of the hospital and the rush of the Citadel beyond neutered into silence. It was never like this back home. Creaky doors and quiet chatter through the drafty spaces along windows. The sound of footsteps in the apartment one floor up, doors slamming below, sounds of traffic. Corrine opens her eyes.

The first thing she ever did in her new place was cut her hair. Still licking her wounds from a bad breakup, breaking her old lease. New place, new me. New life, new me. Corrine takes hold of limp strand of hair. It’s down past her shoulders now, frayed and broken at the ends. The cut had been Anita’s idea actually. And mostly her doing. She’d done a couple months of cosmetology school before jumping ship. Enough to cut it straight, to layer. Corrine loved it, even if she’d had to drink half a six pack to muster up the courage to let her do it. Loved the way it framed her face, her cheekbones. The way it made her hair bouncy and light. Chic. Feminine. Stupid shit now, really. Especially now. Still so thin, so bony. Her eyes a dull color that makes them hard to look at. And her hair. Corrine winds a strand around her finger. It’s brittle, like all the life has been sucked out of her. The thought catches in her brain. She can feel the smooth, bodied push of the membrane all around her. The slick rush of her own blood down her skin. Corrine grips the sides of the counter, stares hard into the mirror. She tries to steady her breathing. She’d seen Adrien do that, once or twice. Watched his eyes fly open from the corner of the tent at night, a sound of bullets just over the ridge, or the metallic whap of a downed ship hitting rock. Such a small sound for all those deaths. She’d watched him lay his hands just below where his heart might be. Breathe in, breathe out. Over and over until his eyes gently closed again. She does it now. Lays her hands just below her ribs and breathes. Her thoughts drift easily away. To the cool of the terracotta tile under her feet in the kitchen in the mornings, the sun rising pink, dripping light across the palm lined streets. She can smell coffee, feel the heat of the steam from the kettle on her face. Anita is saying something, her voice just beyond what Corrine can hear. Garbled. She’s trying to turn, to look, to tell her to speak louder but she can’t. Her chest is so tight, this bottomless nauseous feeling in her gut. A homesickness that feels so real and so intense it’s physically painful. Like her heart will carve itself out of her chest, all jagged pieces. Corrine exhales loudly, gripping the sides of the metal counter. The breathing isn’t helping. “Fuck. Fuck!” She can’t think about. Can’t think about any of this shit. It’s cresting over her like a wave. She takes a long, ragged breath in, then looks at herself hard in the mirror, nails digging into the metal of the counter so hard her knuckles ache. “You’re fine.” And then louder, firmer. “You’re fine.” Her reflection wobbles, limp strands of hair like tentacles along her shoulders. Inhuman. Like everything else here.

Corrine thinks Nyxrias might be young. For an Asari, at least. Their ages, mostly, beyond her comprehension ( _by age 200 most young Asari are ready to leave home and begin their independent lives,_ she’d had to read that three times before closing the extranet site, the sudden scope of eternity coming into clear, unpleasant view _)._ But Corrine’s fairly certain they’re at least socially the same age. They know the same bands, have seen the same movies. Even if Nyxrias is an unpleasant reminder that while LA might be the coolest place on Earth, it’s real backwater shit on the Citadel. But the point still stands. She’s recognizable, Corrine thinks, as a friend, a peer. Whatever that means here at the end of the world. And maybe Corrine is that to her too. Which is why when she wanders toward the nurse’s station, Nyxrias greets her only with a pair of narrowed eyes and a halfcocked smile

Corrine is still a little unsteady on her feet, still heavy from the weight of the memory that had washed over her in the mirror. She steadies herself on the counter then flashes a bright smile, one that feels like it’s from another life entirely, the stretches out the sore corners of her mouth. “If someone was hypothetically looking for a pair of scissors…”

Nyxrias raises the spot where an eyebrow should be “Scissors?”

_Need to make sure you don’t hurt yourself,_ she’d said at first, but when Corrine glances over in the mirror to find Nyxrias trying hard to stifle a laugh she figures there was probably an ulterior motive. “Something funny?”

Nyxrias crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Nope.” Corrine shifts. She’s got her knees on either side of the sink, perched like a scrawny cat in front of the mirror. She snips the first strand of hair, lets it fall into the basin of the sink. It feels more important than it should. Almost exhilarating. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

Corrine swallows, tries not to think of Anita at her side, the jasmine smell of her perfume, all the windows in their apartment open to let in the warm summer breeze. “Sort of.”

“Oh good. Can’t wait to see what kind of human carnage you leave behind.”

“It’s gonna be fine.” Corrine snips more off. Snips and snips and snips until the sink is filling with her hair. She tries not to think about the way it’s starting to look like a pool of dried blood, the thought bubbling up bizarrely from the base of her brain. She tries to shake it off, worried that other memories will rise up, ones she can’t dismiss as easily. “Where are you from anyway?” She pauses, scissors loose in one hand and glances back at Nyxrias. Corrine’s not sure where the question even comes from. Maybe it’s because her steadily shortening hair is making her feel energized, almost manic. Full of bright fear. Because it’s not really a question you’re supposed to ask now. One that almost nobody asks anymore. The CItadel's single real acknowledgment that something bad is happening. 

And Nyxrias seems to be debating whether or not to answer it, her mouth tight, arms still crossed over her chest. She sighs, pushing a little off the wall. “Hyetiana”

Corrine exhales, some of the pressure let out in the air of the room even if the tension still hangs, tighter now. “Where’s that?

“Far from here.” Nyxrias holds up a hand, “and I know your next question. No, the reapers aren’t there yet.”

“Wasn’t even gonna ask.”

“Sure.”

Corrine snips another strand of hair, watches it fall into the sink. The last thing she wants to talk about are reapers, the awful flang of their metallic shrieking still an almost constant backdrop to her dreams. “What’s it like?

“Cold. Freezing. Lots of scientists.”

Corrine laughs. “Sounds great.”

“Yeah, I’m sure the reapers are gonna love it.” Corrine swallows. She glances out at the Citadel out her window then quickly back at the mirror, snipping off another thick strand of hair. “Are you from Earth?”

Corrine’s chest twinges, a sensation she tries to brush off. “Yeah, of course.”

Nyxrias scoffs. “Of course! You showed up with a regiment of turians who the Goddess knows where you’re from.”

Corrine’s lips twitch down, she pauses, still perched on the sink, scissors hovering under her chin. “How are the turians?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like…just in general.”

.Nyxrias looks suddenly drawn, she settles back against the wall. "They lost Palaven.”

Her whole body feels like it’s tightening at once and she presses her hand to the metal to keep herself steady “Like…all of it?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Last week. They ran the news bulletin over prime time. They never do that on the Citadel.” Corrine sits back on her haunches. Her hair looks thicker now, better but her eyes are still so dull. Haunted. Awful. “You got quiet.”

“Yeah.”

Nyxrias appears behind her in the mirror, so close they’re almost touching. “Yeah.” She sighs. “Have you been thinking about home then? Is that why you asked me about mine?”

“No.” Corrine sets the scissors gently down on the sink then slides off. She musses the ends of her hair with her fingers. “Not really,”

This part of her routine is the one she tries to think the least about. Worry the least about. Because it makes her heart thump. The wait, the dark ether of the extranet and then the shivering pixels of his face and then him, clear as if he was there with her. And sometimes she can smell Menae’s ash when she sees him but always, _always_ something in her chest unclenches at the sight of his face and the way her heart thumps isn’t fear. 

His mandibles flutter when her own pixels reorder themselves. Her heart does too. Adrien shifts. She can tell that he’s resting his hand on one knee, like his shouldes are heavy, and she is suddenly filled with a burning, _screaming_ desire to ask about Palaven. What will happen now that it’s lost? To you? To Earth? But she takes her tongue between her teeth, tries to figure out something, anything, else to say. The silence grows. Adrien shifts again. “Your fringe is different.”

Corrine laughs, relief cutting clean through her. She rocks her hips as she sits a little more up. She’s angled the camera on her omni tool so it’s looking just a little down, so he can see her whole body. She doesn’t know exactly why she’s done that, except maybe that it's what she used to do with old boyfriends. Even though this feels nothing like that. More intense than any of that ever felt. “My hair.”

“Your hair is different then.”

“I cut it.”

He flinches. “Are you alright?”

She frowns, curling her still injured hand closer to her body. “What?”

“You cut your…it doesn’t…does that not…hurt?”

She laughs. “No, it’s dead.”

“Oh.” His mandibles flutter. “Hmm.” A beat of silence. “It’s nice.”

Her heart is pounding again. Body a little woozy like it’s lost its ability to tell fear from excitement. “You think?”

“Yes.”

“Can you even tell humans apart?”

His mandibles twitch, scolding. It’s a thrill, really, to tease him. To tease this man who holds so much of the galaxy in the palms of his taloned hands. The first time had been a month ago, an accident, but he’d made a sound that was almost a chuckle and it had freed something inside of her. “No.” Then he quickly amends. “You, I suppose. I could pick you out of a crowd.”

She feels the heat of his words square in the chest. “Sweet of you.”

“ _Sweet_ is not something I’ve ever been.” Corrine curls the fingers on her good hand around his dogtags, tries to find something to say to _that_ that doesn’t feel like she’s cutting herself open. He interjects again. “I heard you’ve been difficult”

“Difficult?”

“Your medical records show that you leave your room after hours. The nurses have to bring you back.”

She laughs, loudly, brightly. So loud and bright it makes her muscles ache. She has been doing that. Often. So often they barely even reprimand her for it anymore. “Is it even legal the way you’re trawling through my medical records?”

“I’m the Primarch of Palaven”

“You know,” she says, running her fingers along the cloth hem of her shorts, “I really have no idea what that means.”

His mandibles twitch in a way she knows now is meant to be teasing. “Are all humans so narrowly informed”

“Yeah, all of us.”

He makes that sound again, the one that’s almost a chuckle, that comes warm through her translator. “No wonder you’re so hard to deal with”

She grins, feeling suddenly cocooned by the darkness in the room. “Me?”

“Not you.” That sound again. “Sometimes you.”

“It’s nice to be out there. There’s trees and stuff. Greenery. They don’t really have that in the rooms.” He narrows his eyes and she can feel the air shift, like she’s said something she shouldn’t have.

“Are your needs being met?”

“What? Yeah, of course, I just-“ She moves and that familiar pain in her hand comes roaring back to life. Corrine can’t hid her flinch.

“Are you alright?”

“Fine.” She grits her teeth, the pain receding only in inches as she lets the hand rest on her bent knee. 

“ _Really._ ” 

“I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“I’m not sure I know the feeling anymore. Worry,” he clarifies, clearing his throat. “Or perhaps it’s all I feel and can’t tell the difference.”

“Well cut it out.”

His mandibles flutter. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve received an order? From anyone. About anything.”

She looks up. There’s something in his eyes that she can’t name, that makes her feel hot and strange and like the air in the room around her has thickened. “Might be good for you.”

His mandibles twitch, just once. “Might be.” She can see, reflected over his face, the silent rush of the cars driving past toward the presidium. Two places so far from home. She wishes she could crawl through her screen, away. Toward him. Wishes she could curl against the mass of him, listen to him breathe. Steady and slow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


	9. Citadel - Widow - Serpent Nebula

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long time no see guys. I hope to be updating this pretty regularly again (emphasis on hoping) but thank you so much for all your patience <3

It’s like a wave. The way it crosses the atrium. Starting near the vid screens beside the entrance then washing over Corrine where she sits watching the steaming traffic of the Citadel below. A hush that becomes deafening, thick. She is surrounded by silence before she can clock it. Gazing up at the vid screen before she can even understand what she is seeing. But it doesn’t take her long after that. The quiet salarian documentary on Sur-Keshian sea life replaced with the streaming bottom banners of the Citadel news. A stern, shaken asari stiff at her news desk. Behind her a vid of a planet – pine green and dark watered – and the unmistakable shape of the reapers looming at the edges of its system. The scrolling text just a single sentence. _Thessia under Attack!: Reapers threaten Asari Space._

Corrine can walk now on her own, if shakily. No longer awash in a sea of sedatives, the pain is more frequent but duller. She still can’t look at the skin around her right knee even if her fingers sometimes drift there as she lays in bed, studying the strange metallic feeling of it. But it still makes her unsteady and as she rises quickly to her feet, propelled by the sudden strangeness of seeing a reaper on live Citadel tv, it twinges. Corrine winces, reaches back to steady herself on the arm of the chair. The unease that has been running backtrack in her body for weeks now settles sharply under her skin. Not because the reapers are there. Corrine knows, through what little Adrien has let slip in their now near nightly conversations, that the reapers are everywhere. Just about. It’s that they’re showing them on the news here. They’ve never done that before. Not like this. In the middle of the day, interrupting another broadcast. She doesn’t know how far Thessia is from the Citadel, has not even the slightest idea, and is wishing now she had paid attention, even once, in her galactic geography courses.

“Of course, _this_ would make the news.” Corrine hadn’t noticed the turian sitting in the neighboring seat before now. He’s straight-backed, his talons digging into the soft fabric of the chair. He looks young though she isn’t sure how she knows that, comparatively. And she thinks he is a marine though she has no real reason to. Maybe it’s the scar on his shoulder. Flesh torn up, mottled and warped like from a bad burn. The tent where she slept beside Adrien always smelled, just faintly, of smoke. She can almost feel the dark shale under her feet. “Palaven’s been burning for months and nothing.” The bones of his carapace are white, clan markings tattooed blue across his cheeks. Words she didn’t nkow before but can trace intimately in the grooves of her own mind now. Adrien’s are white. She always wants to ask him when he calls, swathed in the artificial darkness of that human ship, if it hurt to get them. How badly, for how long. Pain killers still swim in her blood, soften her thoughts, make them sometimes bank like a drifting ship. “But some matriarch sees a reaper out her window and now the whole galaxy needs to hear about it.”

“Goddess.” Nyxrias has come up behind them, holding a datapad loosely in her hand, the screen blinking but forgotten. She comes to stand beside Corrine, head craned back like everyone else to watch the scene unfolding on the vid screen. But Corrine can only watch her. Watch her jaw tighten, the muscles of her cheeks clench. Asari skin looks so much thicker than human skin, so much less pliable, but yet she can see every inch of it flinch.

“I’m sorry,” she says before she can think better of it and the “is that where you’re from?” before she can stop herself. The turian beside them bristles, wags his mandibles in a way that Corrine thinks makes him look almost embarrassed.

At first, Nyxrias says nothing, just stares. Corrine watches it reflect in her eyes. The video of the planet is enlarged now. She can see bursts of orange light against the blackness of space, specks of destruction in her dark iris. Nyxrias blinks. Once, twice, then shakes her head. “Yeah.” She turns back to the look at the hospital’s intake desk. Corrine follows her gaze. Not a soul is moving, all eyes trained to the vid screen. But then, one by one, they turn back to their datapads, turn away from the news. Nyxrias takes a long, audible breath. “Let’s get you back to your room, huh? We need to draw some blood.” But neither of them move.

Corrine feels her lip twitch, tremble. “It’ll be okay.” Nyxrias looks stone faced up at her. Corrine swallows. “I was on Earth.” Her voice keeps catching against her teeth, starting and stopping. “When they…” She clears her throat. “Not everyone died.” But it’s only just out of her mouth when she realizes with a sudden shock of clarity that she doesn’t know that. Not for sure. Her heart beats like a reminder in at the base of her jaw. “I mean I didn’t die.” It almost seems to echo, even in the resumed chatter of the atrium. Like she’s hearing it for the first time, understanding it for the first time. Nyxrias is rooted in place, clutching her datapad. “I just wanted you to know that…I’m trying to say that…maybe not everything is…” Her knee twinges, her heart moving from her throat to her ears. She must be losing her footing because Nyxrias reaches out to grab hold of her, her hand firm and steady on Corrine’s arm. She tries to remember the last thing she ate. On Earth. She can’t and she doesn’t know why she’s doing it. Remembering and talking but her mouth won’t stop. Someone has muted the news broadcast. No one is watching now but Corrine can still see the reflection of the reapers in the far window’s glass, drifting slowly, doubled and wobbly. “I just want you to know…” The light reflects off the blue in Nyxrias; skin and it’s all Corrine can see, her vision narrowed to a fine point. She can feel the press of the membrane, a memory so faint it’s like a kiss. If Nyxrias weren’t holding her up she might buckle. “That maybe not everyone will...”

Nyxrias puts her hand under Corrine’s arm, straightens her up as they make their way away from the atrium toward the inpatient wing, It’s tranquilizing, the weight, the warmth. “I know,” she says, her voice quiet, like she’s whispering a secret. “It’s okay.” This time her voice is different, distant. Like she’s saying it to herself.

She finds him again that evening, back in the atrium. After dinner and vitals. After the shock has worn off, smoothed down like all the other shocks. Corrine knows he’s the same one because of his markings, the blue shimmering against the reflection of the Citadel’s lights through the window. He’s in the same spot. Like he hasn’t moved all day. Beyond him, the city thrums. Lines of cars flowing beneath them. Unchanged. Unbothered.

The turian eyes her as she comes to sit where she had before. “What do you want?”

“Just to sit.” Corrine winces as she lowers herself down, her right knee tensing, a jolt of pain up her leg. His mandibles flare stiffly in a way she can’t quite read. She rests her hands on her knees, curls her fingers over them. Bonier than they’ve ever been, like she’s left pieces of herself scattered across the galaxy. She watches the lines of light stretch over the Presidium, dip down toward the other end of the station. The single reminder in that sky of false stars that they are drifting quietly through empty space, up and down all relative. Corrine doesn’t know where they are, she realizes. If they’re far from Earth or Palaven. Or Menae. If they’re close to anything at all. She turns to look at the turian, finds him still looking at her. Turian eyes look like marbles, all shifting, swirling color. “I’m…sorry about Palaven.”

“Hmmm.” He turns back to the windows, mandibles flaring gentler now. “I’m sorry about Earth.”

Corrine sort of scoffs, sort of laughs. She releases her grip on her knees. “Thanks.”

The turian grunts, fidgets. It’s a quiet in the atrium. Just a few other patients on the other side of the room, a singular nurse behind the front desk. “I was fighting on Oma Ker. Got blown to pieces. Ended up here.” He winces as he moves his body, like he’s remembering. 

“I don’t know where Oma Ker is.” It feels like such an impotent thing to say but her brain supplies nothing else.

He makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, tinged bitter, bookended with coughing. “Yeah well, neither did most of us. We gotta fight and die on this rock because the Hierarchy tells us to. Even our generals are cannon fodder.” In her mind’s eye, Corrine can see Adrien standing at the flaps of the tent, his blood running blue onto the shale. The sound of gunfire so loud the tent shakes. Corrine looks over at the turian beside her, at the taut musculature of his bare shoulders. So alien but more familiar to her now than anything else here, than anything else she can remember. She watches the turian roll his shoulders. Even sitting he towers over her. He looks over his shoulder, then briefly at her before staring again out the long window. “It’s the end of the world and I gotta be here, sitting in this chair, thinking about my life.” He makes a sound her ears don’t quite register, one that makes all the hair on her arms stand on end. “I wish I could have done anything else with it.”

Corrine looks at him. He’s slumped there, in this chair, the neon of the Citadel night reflecting off the white of his carapace. “Why didn’t you?”

“That’s not how it works on Palaven.”

Corrine doesn’t sleep that night. She lays in bed and watches her reflection in the window, watches the way the lights pass over it. Her thoughts are a blur, the sedative Nyxrias gave her swimming through her veins. She can’t think of home. Can’t think of the way the air shook, the way the earth broke loose, the sharp piercing sound of Anita’s scream. She can’t think of here either. Of these sterile walls and gaunt faces. But she can think of him. In that tent. The long, hard lines of his body. The bulk of him at the flap of tent, shielding her from the gunfire beyond, from the shrieks of the reapers. Half awake, half asleep she reaches for him, closes her fingers around air. It’s been so long since she’s been touched, really touched. Not for vitals, not to draw blood. Touched like a human being. Her vision softens. Taillights bleed out into the simulated night. From her bed they look like bombs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


End file.
